About
Association for Child & Adolescent Counseling
About Us
ACAC is a support and information network for counselors who work with children and adolescents.
The American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics (2014) and the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs standards (2009) charges counselors with enhancing human development across the lifespan; therefore, ACAC supports counselors working with children and adolescents from birth through adolescent. The breath of this developmental range offers its own unique experiences and challenges. ACAC serves to bring a community of counselors together who strive to offer best practices to this underserved and distinct population.
Why ACA?
Our Goals
The Association for Child and Adolescent Counseling is committed to the principle that all children and adolescents (ages birth through adolescence) have equal access to a full array of mental health services, regardless of ability to pay or insurance coverage.
Timeline & History
Compiled by Past-Presidents Council:
Randy Astramovich, Evette Horton, Elsa Leggett, Gail Roaten, Dee Ray, and Catherine Tucker
Excerpt from the editor:
“The Association for Child and Adolescent Counseling (ACAC), a division of the American Counseling Association (ACA), is pleased to launch our new journal, Journal of Child and Adolescent Counseling(JCAC). This journal is the culmination of more than a decade of work to build a home for child and adolescent counselors within the counseling community. ACAC was accepted as an official division of ACA in 2013, a recognition that the need for a professional organization concentrating on child and adolescent issues was long overdue. As part of the mission of ACAC, we always envisioned that building a credible, peer-reviewed venue for child and adolescent literature was integral to our identity as an organization.
In recent years, I worked on a research team that explored the publication practices of counseling professionals (see Barrio Minton, Fernando, & Ray,2008). We found that although participating authors from varying expertise areas published their works in professional counseling journals, authors who specialize with children were more likely to publish their works in venues outside of the counseling field. The most obvious reason for this practice is that there was simply no venue available to them that focused on working with children. Previously, members of ACA had no available literature that was specific to the developmental focus of counseling children and adolescents. Times have changed, and JCAC has launched to provide a new era for child and adolescent counselors.”
