Child Psychology

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mmdw

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Hi!
I just graduated with me bachelors in psychology and am deciding on what to do about grad school. I am really interested in child psychology, but the posts on this message board seem to be somewhat negative about the job outlook and salary vs student loans. Can anyone provide any positive viewpoints on the field?

Thanks for any help any of you can provide!

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I would also look at school psychology programs, because their focus is on children. There are many ones that are well-funded and have a clinical rather than an educational bent if that is your preference.
 
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You can apply to phd programs in clinical psychology. Most programs tend to waive tuition and supply assistantships, meaning that your cost of attending school is minimal. Some prorams have a concentration in child psychology as an option. You can apply to programs that don't offer a concentration also. The main thing is that the faculty you end up working is researching child related topics (and topics YOU are interested in also). From what I have been told, where you intern after your formal school training will help to define your specialization. Basically, the schools you apply to do not have to or need to offer a child psyc concentration of you to work with children. As somebody who is interested and applying to schools in child related psychology fields, I only have a few schools that actually offer a concentration option (3 out of 17). All others simply have faculty who focus on children.

Hope this is helpful.
Oh, and start the application process early early early if you decide to go with applying to clincal phd programs! :)
 
I'm not a "child person," but there are quite a few in my program, so I'll offer what I've been able to gather on the topic. As far as I know, and as others have already said, the number of schools offering concentrations in child psychology is much smaller than the number of programs that will allow you to work primarily with children.

In choosing programs of interest, and again as others have said, focus on identifying those departments with faculty who predominantly work (clinically and research-wise) with children. You'll also want to select schools whose practicum placements include sites at which children would be an available population. As with my specialty (neuropsychology), whether or not the program explicitly offers a concentration in "child psychology" is much less important than whether or not you'd be able to focus on your interests during the course of obtaining a general clinical psychology degree. Furthermore, I'd make the argument that such generalist training tends to make you more competitive for internship, and offers you a more solid foundation of knowledge upon which you can then build your chosen specialization.

I will agree that where you intern, and even more so where/if you obtain your post-doc, affects your specialty training and status significantly more than your doctoral program. However, in order to get into a child-focused internship, you're likely going to need a good amount of experience working with children in order to be competitive with other applicants.

Finally, in terms of job outlook, from what I've heard, the overall prospects for clinicians working with children are better than for those working with adults. This is owing largely to the fact that there are significantly fewer child-focused clinicians being churned out. Child neuropsychologists in particular are, again from what I've heard, in rather high demand.
 
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