The 6 Best Online Therapy Services for Kids

Paying for Online Therapy for Kids

Therapy, even online therapy, can be expensive, especially if the company does not accept insurance or accepts only a small list of insurance plans, such as Little Otter. But other services are in-network with many insurance plans, where you would only be responsible for your copay; and some services offer more affordable monthly subscriptions. Online therapy directories, like Alma, let you search for child and adolescent therapists who accept your insurance or filter your results by how much you can afford to pay out-of-pocket. 

Medication and Online Therapy for Kids

Most online therapy services, even if they offer psychiatry for adults, do not offer psychiatry for children or teens. I’ve included three notable exceptions in this list: Little Otter and Doctor on Demand, which provide psychiatry for children of any age, and Talkiatry, an online psychiatry service that treats kids as young as five.

It’s important to note that most online psychiatry or medication management services will not prescribe controlled substances, such as Adderall for ADHD; the only company on this list that will do so is Talkiatry.

How I Review Online Therapy Services

I’ve spent years testing and surveying real therapy users and reviewing their experiences to help rate and share the best online therapy services. You can see a full breakdown of our online therapy research and testing process on Verywell Mind. Here is an overview of how I capture and evaluate firsthand experience and survey data.

Firsthand Experience

I had 65 different people sign up for talk therapy with all 55 online therapy companies reviewed. Over the past three years, I’ve published 153 reviews (here are our reviews for BetterHelp and Talkspace, for instance). I had my testers try out each company’s therapy services, and if the company offered other services (like couples therapy and kid or teen therapy) we tested those too. 

I asked each tester to try each service for at least a month, which usually meant between two and six sessions at each company. I also asked testers to switch therapists partway through, if possible, in order to get a holistic idea of the offerings and quality of each company. My testers were located all across the United States and abroad, meaning I gained extensive information about each company’s services in a variety of areas.

Evaluating Children’s Services

When choosing which companies to include in this list, I paid particular attention to which ones offer services to children and/or teens, and in each case, had at least one tester try out each company’s child or teen therapy or psychiatry services. I evaluated the experiences my testers and their children had at each company, and highlighted the ones where those services were outstanding.

User Surveys

I surveyed more than 8,000 therapy clients who are currently using one of the 55 online therapy companies tested or who had used one in the recent past, as well as users of 27 different online therapy directories. I asked users to evaluate each company’s services, from their therapist’s qualifications to whether they found a therapist who met all their needs to how they’d rate the company overall—all told, I gathered 350 different data points. 

Why Trust Verywell Mind

Hannah Owens is Verywell Mind’s Mental Health Editor. Hannah is a licensed social worker with a clinical background in community mental health. She’s worked at programs treating those with serious mental illness, providing both individual and group therapy. In her time at Verywell Mind, Hannah has designed and run years of online therapy testing, overseeing and editing reviews of the top online therapy companies out there and writing and editing roundups of the best online therapy services based on our extensive and thorough testing. Hannah brings her unique combination of both clinical and editorial expertise to her work for Verywell Mind.

• Licensed social worker since 2019
• Clinical background in community mental health
• Specializes in serious mental illness
• Believes in the mission of online therapy to make mental healthcare more accessible

Once we completed this testing and these surveys, we evaluated our findings with the help of three licensed therapists—Amy Marschall, PsyD; Nic Hardy, PhD, LCSW; and Hannah Owens, LMSW—in order to make our recommendations. These therapists provided extensive insight into the ethics and efficacy of online therapy as well as information about relevant therapeutic modalities and approaches.