An Integrated Framework for Professional Ethical Thinking in Child Clinical Psychology

Practitioners face a number of unique challenges in child clinical psychology, particularly around areas such as competency, consent, confidentiality, and the balance of obligations towards the child or young person and their legal guardians. Resorting to ethical codes of practice to try and deal with these ethical dilemmas often fails to resolve the problem adequately, or leads to ‘moral blindness’ in which other ethical issues are ignored (Ward & Syversen, 2009). In order to provide a more complete ethical guideline for practitioners to consult when faced with ethical quandaries, I have created the Integrated Framework for Professional Ethical Thinking (IFPET) that is specifically tailored towards child and adolescent clinical psychology. The IFPET model provides a multi-faceted approach to ethical thinking that widens moral reasoning and awareness and promotes a more complete approach towards dealing with ethical issues in child and adolescent clinical psychology.