A family therapy intake form that can hold an actual household

Families are not two people, and the form should not assume it is

A family counseling intake form has a structural problem that individual and couples forms do not: nobody knows in advance how many people are involved. A blended household with a stepparent, three children and a grandparent living in does not fit a form with two name fields and a line for dependants, and the practice ends up with the shape of the family written sideways in a margin. This preset starts from a repeating household section instead. Add a row per person with their relationship, age, whether they live in the home and whether they are attending sessions — which matters, because the family members who are not coming often shape what happens in the room. Editable throughout, PDF straight away, no account.

• Built for HIPAA-compliant workflows

• Free to start — 50 patient actions each month

What a family intake form therapy practices need usually covers

The household section first, one row per member. Then who is completing the form and their relationship to the others, since that shapes how every subsequent answer should be read. The presenting concerns in the family's words, and what each attending member hopes will change. Relevant history — previous family or individual therapy, significant events such as separation, bereavement, relocation or illness, and current supports. Where a minor is involved, guardianship and consent details, and who has authority to consent to treatment, which is a question a form should ask rather than assume. Practice policies covering confidentiality in family work specifically, cancellation terms, and signatures from the adults with authority to give them.

Shared or individual answers, your call

As in couples work, practices differ on whether family members answer together or separately, and both approaches are defensible. Completing it together produces one agreed account and starts a conversation before the first session; completing it separately surfaces the differences in how a teenager and a parent describe the same situation, which is frequently the most useful thing in the file. The preset lets your practice choose the response mode before sending, and lays the document out to match — one shared set of questions, or an individual section per attending member. Choosing deliberately is the point; most downloadable forms make the decision for you by accident of layout.

Edit it, then download exactly what you built

Rename the form, rewrite any question or piece of helper text, mark fields required or optional, switch the response mode, adjust how many household rows appear by default, and add, duplicate, reorder or remove sections. A practice working mostly with adolescents and parents shapes this differently from one working with adult siblings and ageing parents, and both are minutes of editing. A default PDF is ready as soon as the page loads, and after any change a new PDF is generated from your current version, so what you download is what you built. It prints on US Letter with clean page breaks and reset restores the original whenever you want.

A practice working with adolescents, one afternoon

A therapist whose caseload is mostly parents and teenagers starts from this preset. She sets the response mode to individual, because the gap between how a parent and a fifteen-year-old describe the same week is exactly what she wants to see before the first session. She adds a question asking each person what they think the others would say the problem is. She expands the guardianship section after a case involving separated parents where consent authority was genuinely unclear. She writes her own confidentiality paragraph explaining what she does and does not share back to parents, which for adolescent work is the paragraph families ask about most. Her attorney reviews it for her state. One afternoon, well spent.

No scoring, and the crisis wording stays yours

The form records what family members report and stops there. It does not score family functioning, rate a relationship, contain any assessment instrument, suggest a diagnosis, triage urgency, or advise on what the family should do — all of that is the work of a licensed clinician in the room. Safety and crisis process is a section your practice writes and owns, with the contacts and escalation steps your setting and jurisdiction require. Have a licensed clinician review the clinical questions for your caseload, and your attorney check consent, guardianship and confidentiality wording, which is more complicated in family work than in individual therapy and varies by state and licence. Where a minor is the primary client rather than one member of a family being seen together, that is a different document and belongs on its own form.