PSY-FPX6020 covers advocacy as a genuine professional competency for psychologists working with children and adolescents — extending beyond individual intervention into policy and systems-level change.
Individual and systems-level advocacy
PSY-FPX6020 examines advocacy across multiple levels — helping an individual child or family navigate a system (school, healthcare, legal), versus advocating for systemic policy changes that affect entire populations of young people, and matching the right advocacy approach to a given problem's scope.
Policy awareness and child/adolescent developmental needs
The course covers how public policy (education policy, child welfare policy, juvenile justice policy) shapes the environments children and adolescents develop within, and how psychology professionals can meaningfully contribute developmental science expertise to policy conversations.
Key topics in PSY-FPX6020
- Individual-level advocacy: helping families navigate systems
- Systems-level advocacy: policy change for entire populations
- Education, child welfare, and juvenile justice policy awareness
- Contributing developmental science expertise to policy conversations
- Matching advocacy approach to problem scope
- Ethical considerations in psychologist-as-advocate roles
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Worked example: matching advocacy level to a systemic problem
- Issue: A student is repeatedly suspended for behavior linked to an undiagnosed learning disability
- Individual advocacy: Helping this specific family navigate the school's evaluation and accommodation process
- Systems advocacy: If this pattern is widespread, working with policymakers to reform school discipline policies that disproportionately punish students with unaddressed learning needs rather than connecting them to evaluation
- Lesson: A single case can reveal both an immediate individual need and a broader systemic problem worth addressing separately
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FlexPath child and adolescent advocacy competency assessments.
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Frequently asked questions
Many of the challenges affecting children and adolescents' development and wellbeing — inadequate school resources, gaps in the child welfare system, punitive rather than developmentally-informed juvenile justice policies — exist at a systemic or policy level that individual clinical intervention alone cannot address, no matter how skilled the individual clinician is. PSY-FPX6020 teaches advocacy as a genuine professional competency because psychologists who work directly with children and adolescents often have unique, credible expertise about developmental needs and the real-world effects of policy decisions — expertise that can meaningfully inform policy conversations — and choosing not to engage in advocacy leaves that valuable expert perspective absent from decisions that significantly shape the environments children develop within.
The right advocacy level depends on the scope and nature of the problem: a specific family struggling to access a service they're entitled to, or a single child needing a particular accommodation, typically calls for individual-level advocacy — helping that specific family or child navigate the relevant system effectively. A recurring pattern affecting many children similarly — a school policy that systematically disadvantages a particular group, or a state law that doesn't align with developmental science — calls for systems-level advocacy aimed at changing the underlying policy or practice itself. PSY-FPX6020 teaches that a single individual case can sometimes reveal both needs simultaneously — the immediate family needs help navigating the current system now, while the broader pattern the case reveals may also warrant separate systems-level advocacy work aimed at preventing the same problem from recurring for other families in the future.