This Child Needs Help

This Child Needs Help fills a gap in the parenting and behavioral health space, bridging personal memoir and policy advocacy for a broad cross-section of readers: parents navigating complex childhood mental health needs, educators, and behavioral health professionals hungry for a new vision. Drawing on lived family experience, it makes a compelling case for moving away from crisis-driven systems toward developmental, trauma-informed care - a title with strong appeal across multiple sections and audiences.

When traditional systems could not meet her children's needs, Peggy Dolane became an advocate for children's behavioral health reform. Using her family's journey to illustrate gaps in our system of care, Dolane carefully outlines how many well-intended interventions, built by adapting adult models to children, often produce unintended consequences with lifelong negative impacts.

Blending personal narrative with policy insight, she examines how child-serving systems, from mental health care to education to juvenile justice to disability services, frequently mirror adult structures rather than align with the developmental needs of childhood. Through the lens of family centered care and caregiver advocacy, she reveals how barriers embedded in behavioral health care systems undermine both prevention and healing. What begins as one mother's effort to find support for her son and daughter expands into a broader investigation of how stigma, misdiagnosis, and fragmented mental health services create obstacles to wellness instead of pathways toward healthy adulthood.

You will come away from this book with a clear understanding of how to advocate for your own children and what society needs to change so that children who struggle to fit in may be supported to become thriving, successful adults.