Colman Noctor: Obsessive behaviour is not the problem, but the child’s solution to it

Parents need to discover what lies beneath their child's difficult behaviour 

Picture: iStock 

When it comes to childhood behaviours, one of the most common questions parents ask me is: ‘At what point do we need to do something?’. There is no straightforward answer. Many problematic childhood behaviours are developmentally specific. For example, parents would be less worried about a three-year-old child talking to an imaginary friend, than a 15 year old doing the same thing.

Freud described mental health problems as ‘a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind’, which suggests that most of us experience mental health symptoms, but not significantly enough to need an intervention.