For families whose children face risks the standard advice was never written for.
A year of confidential, clinically-led work with Dr Catherine Knibbs, with the parents, with the children, and with the people around them.
One practitioner. One clinical picture. The whole family.
I take no more than four families a year, and each one is worked with alone. This is never a group.
Something has already happened. An image that exists somewhere. A message from someone who was not who they said they were. A demand for money. You are handling it privately, and you would like to keep it that way.
Nothing has happened yet, and you can see where this is going. The phone came early. The group chats are unsupervised. None of the advice in the headlines is written for a family like yours.
Your child is already struggling. The sleep, the withdrawal, the rage, the flat affect at the dinner table. You suspect the screen is a symptom rather than a cause, and you would like someone who can tell the difference.
Your children are findable. A family name, a company, perhaps a parent who appears in print, a school with a website and a fixture list. That is not the starting position any parenting book assumes.
The devices arrive earlier, often administered by a nanny or an assistant rather than by you. The structure is complicated: boarding, travel, two households, two sets of rules.
And the risk is not only developmental. A sextortion attempt against a fourteen-year-old is a clinical emergency, a security incident and a reputational one at the same moment, usually met by three people who are not talking to each other. A school referral creates a record. NHS waiting lists run to seasons. None of it is confidential in the way you need.
Families in this position end up holding four separate relationships: someone for the child, someone for the parents, a school that half-knows, and an adviser managing the incident. None can speak to each other, so the family becomes the switchboard at the moment it has least capacity for it.
I am qualified and insured to work with the children and with the adults. Nothing has to be explained twice, and nothing falls into the gap between two professionals. It also lets me see what is usually invisible from any single chair: what is happening between you, not only what is happening to each of you.
A full assessment day at the start. A written clinical formulation in plain language. Regular sessions with the parents throughout the year, and direct work with the child where that is clinically indicated.
A private line between sessions, for what does not wait until Tuesday. Work with the adults who hold the day-to-day, so your child is not receiving four sets of rules from four people. Reviews at six months and twelve.
I will talk you through all of it properly before anything is agreed, and it is set out in full in your contract.
Pornography, grooming, sextortion, gore, self-harm content, the video your child watched and has not told you about. Thirty years of this work means I can name any of it without embarrassment, and that matters more than almost anything else, because what your child needs is a parent who can hear it without their face changing.
I am not going to tell you to take the phones away. And if something in the family's setup is making things worse, I will tell you, kindly and directly.
If you want rules, buy a book. Mine or someone else's. They are cheap, freely available, and not what is missing here.
If you want the parenting outsourced, I will decline. The work holds because a parent is in the room.
If a court or contact dispute is live, tell me at the enquiry stage. Sometimes I can help. Often the right answer is an independent expert, and I will say which I think it is.
If your child is in immediate danger, do not email me. Call 999. For an image that needs removing, the Internet Watch Foundation and Childline's Report Remove service. For an active sextortion demand, do not pay, do not delete, contact the police. Then come back to me if you would like to.
Many of the families I work with have a private office, a security adviser or a solicitor already holding part of this. I am used to working alongside them, and comfortable being instructed through them.
Anything I write for a third party is a reflection on the process, from the position of what is in your child's best interests. It is not advice, and not a recommendation for anyone to act on. It is shared only with your consent.
There are none on this page and there never will be. Families who work with me are not written about, spoken about, or used as examples. Not in a keynote, not in a book, not anonymised in a training session. That is a condition of the work, not a courtesy, and I will put it in writing before we speak.
One limit, stated plainly: where a child is at risk of significant harm, I have professional obligations that override confidentiality. I will always tell you before I act on them.
Payable annually or quarterly. A family fee, not a fee per person: it covers the parents, the children, and the work with the adults around them.
It is on this page so neither of us has to raise it later. If this is right for your family, the fee will not be the difficult part of the conversation.
A second year, where useful, is £12,000 plus VAT. An assessment on its own is £3,500 plus VAT, credited in full if you go on to the year within three months.
Four in any year is the whole of it, alongside my research, my organisational work and the practitioners I supervise. Your family is held on its own: there is no cohort, no group session, and no other family in the room. When the four are taken there is a waiting list, and I will tell you honestly how long it is rather than keeping you warm.
PhD, children aged 7 to 10 who have viewed violence and gore online · Consultant Child and Adult Trauma Psychotherapist and Supervisor · Online Harms Consultant, 30 years in technology · Functional Health Practitioner · Author of seven books · Journal Editor, Frontiers, Cybersecurity in Digital Mental Health · TEDx speaker
Advisor to organisations, schools and government on online harm.
Email hello@catherineknibbs.co.uk. That address is kept for this work alone. No form, no CRM, no assistant. It arrives in my inbox and nobody else reads it.
Then thirty minutes with me. Not a discovery call and no presentation, just a conversation about what is actually happening. After that, either an assessment day or a better suggestion. If I am not the right person I will say so and tell you who is.