Top 10 Lessons From 20 Years Working With Young People

November 19, 2025 1 min read

Director of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Top ten things I’ve learned over the last twenty years working with young people–first as a high school English teacher and coach then as a child and adolescent psychiatrist:

Consistency is one of the greatest gifts we can give children.
Structure and routine are incredibly hard to pull off, but they are foundational in raising balanced human beings.
People have a very hard time understanding how their thoughts are connected to their emotions and how those two things are also connected to the choices they make—like a big triangle.
People have an even harder time breaking apart that triangle once they understand those connections and working to rebuild it in order to create better choices for themselves.
“Out is better than in.” If you keep your emotions bottled up, they will eventually exit the body and make themselves known in a variety of different ways—not all of which are welcome or easy to control.
COVID and social media have drastically changed the landscape of the mental health challenges faced by young people today.
Finding outstanding evidence-based mental health care in the United States is incredibly challenging; in fact, it is much harder than it should be.
Life is hard. That being said, there are so many ways to navigate the hard and that is the essence of how mental health should provide support to kids and families.
Parents everywhere are doing their absolute best; I have never met a parent that wasn’t doing their best.
Young people have a tremendous capacity for change and growth—that is why I do the work I do and that is what I LOVE most about the work I do.

About the Author

Tonya Lawrence

Director of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Dr. Lawrence has been serving the greater Philadelphia area as a psychiatrist since 2007. For the past thirteen years, she has served as the Medical Director of Psychiatric Services for Child & Family Focus, Inc.—a community mental health agency that works exclusively with children, adolescents and young adults. She has worked extensively with a wide range of diagnoses that include anxiety, depression, ADHD/ADD, PTSD, Autism, mood disorders and psychotic disorders. In her role as medical director at CFF over the past decade plus, she has focused largely on direct patient care but also oversaw the development of a number of programs–an outpatient clinic serving over 1,000 families, a research based first-episode psychosis program through the University of Pennsylvania serving over 100 individuals, a school-based program in twenty-six public schools in the Philadelphia region and an alternative school placement setting in Delaware county.