This includes aiming to reduce gender dysphoria, making children more comfortable with their bodies, lessening ostracism, and reducing the childs psychiatric comorbidity.Therapeutic intervention seeks to identify and resolve underlying factors (including familial factors), encourage the child to identify with their assigned sex, and encourage same-sex friendships. Parent counseling involves setting limits on the childs cross-gender behavior, encouraging gender-neutral or sex-typical activities, examining familial factors, and examining parental factors such as psychopathology. Researchers Zucker and Susan Bradley state that it has been found that boys with GD often have mothers who, to an extent, reinforced behavior more stereotypical of young girls. They also state that children with GD tend to come from families where cross-gender role behavior was not explicitly discouraged. However, they also acknowledge that one could view these findings as merely indicative of the fact that parents who were more accepting of their childs cross-gender role behavior are also more likely to bring their children to a clinical psychiatrist as opposed to parents who are less accepting of cross-gender role behavior in their children.In 2002, Zucker acknowledged limited data on gender dysphoria in children, stating that "apart from a series of intrasubject behaviour therapy case reports from the 1970s, one will find not a single randomized controlled treatment trial in the literature". He has stated that "the therapist must rely on the clinical wisdom that has accumulated and to utilize largely untested case formulation conceptual models to inform treatment approaches and decisions."
Katherine Wilson of GID Reform Advocates stated:
In the case of gender non-conforming children and adolescents, the GID criteria are significantly broader in scope in the DSM-IV (APA, 1994, p. 537) than in earlier revisions, to the concern of many civil libertarians. A child may be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder without ever having stated any desire to be, or insistence of being, the other sex. Boys are inexplicably held to a much stricter standard of conformity than girls. Most psychologists who specialize in gender identity disorder in children note a higher level of male patients brought to them, rather than female patients. A possible explanation would be that cross-sex behavior is less acceptable and therefore more noticeable and more likely to be viewed as problematic by the childs parents (Bradley, Zucker, 1997). Preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire meets the diagnostic criterion for boys but not for girls, who must insist on wearing only male clothing to merit diagnosis. References to "stereotypical" clothing, toys and activities of the other sex are imprecise in an American culture where much childrens clothing is unisex and appropriate sex role is the subject of political debate. Equally puzzling is a criterion which lists a "strong preference for playmates of the other sex" as symptomatic, and seems to equate mental health with sexual discrimination and segregation. Some clinicians, such as Wilson et al., argue that GIDC "has served to pressurize boys to conform to traditional gender and heterosexual roles."