# Why Therapists Stop Working with Kids and What It Takes to Stay: Sustainability, Boundaries, and Pivots for the Long Haul

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-modern-therapist-s-survival-guide-with-curt-widhalm-and-katie-vernoy-410171/why-therapists-stop-working-with-kids-and-what-it-takes-to-stay-sustainability-boundaries-and-pivots-for-the-long-haul
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-modern-therapist-s-survival-guide-with-curt-widhalm-and-katie-vernoy-410171/why-therapists-stop-working-with-kids-and-what-it-takes-to-stay-sustainability-boundaries-and-pivots-for-the-long-haul.md
Podcast: [The Modern Therapist's Survival Guide with Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-modern-therapist-s-survival-guide-with-curt-widhalm-and-katie-vernoy-410171)
Published: 2026-05-11T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/HEGNI6713517848.mp3?updated=1777499313
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/HEGNI6713517848.mp3?updated=1777499313
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-modern-therapist-s-survival-guide-with-curt-widhalm-and-katie-vernoy-410171/episodes/why-therapists-stop-working-with-kids-and-what-it-takes-to-stay-sustainability-boundaries-and-pivots-for-the-long-haul
Duration seconds: 2567

## Resource

Why Therapists Stop Working with Kids and What It Takes to Stay: Sustainability, Boundaries, and Pivots for the Long Haul Curt Widhalm, LMFT, and Katie Vernoy, LMFT push back on the field's quiet stereotype that working with kids is the "starter home" of private practice, the place clinicians put in time before graduating to a cardigan and a wing-back chair. Working with kids and teens is not entry-level work. It is some of the most clinically and physically demanding work in the profession, and it has a sustainability problem that rarely gets named honestly. Curt and Katie examine why so many therapists who work with kids and teens hit a wall around the five-year mark, and why that wall is rarely about clinical depth. They unpack the sensory toll, the parent communication load, the school and provider coordination, the cost of running a play therapy room, and the way a child caseload can quietly distort a clinician's sense of what is developmentally typical. They also talk about how to build a long-haul career working with kids, teens, and families without becoming, in Curt's words, "a cynical, glitter-covered shell of a human being." This is a conversation for therapists in private practice, supervisors of clinicians who work with minors, and anyone weighing whether to keep working with kids, scale back, or pivot. In this episode, we discuss: Why working with kids is not a lesser clinical specialty Why the work is hard to sustain, and why "burnout" alone does not fully explain it How shifting from kid sessions to family work and parent work extends the clinical impact The sensory, physical, and administrative load of working with kids Why parents contact child therapists more than adult clients contact their own therapists The financial and logistical reality of runn…

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