This text aims to teach parents how to conduct play therapy with their own young children. Parents who take their children for psychotherapy often feel they are to blame for their children's problems, but when they themselves learn to be therapists, they know they are agents of change for the better. As parents gain new insights into their children's behaviour during play sessions, these insights benefit their interaction all week long.

This book addresses a key need for child therapists--how to actively involve parents in treatment and give them tools to support their child's healthy development. Known for her innovative, creative therapeutic approach, Paris Goodyear-Brown weaves together knowledge about play therapy, trauma, attachment theory, and neurobiology. She presents step-by-step strategies to help parents understand their child's needs, reflect on their own emotional triggers, set healthy boundaries, make time together more fun, and respond effectively to challenging behavior. Filled with rich clinical illustrations, the volume features 52 reproducible handouts and worksheets. Purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print the reproducible materials in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

This book integrates the basic and applied literature to provide mental health providers with concrete, evidence-based strategies for building and strengthening the parent-child relationship and addresses challenges typically neglected by intervention manuals.

All families of children affected by trauma are on a journey, and this book will help to guide you and your family on your journey from trauma to trust. Sarah Naish shares her own experiences of adopting five siblings. She describes how to use therapeutic parenting - a deeply nurturing parenting style - to overcome common challenges when raising children who have experienced trauma. The book describes a series of difficult episodes for her family, exploring both parent's and child's experiences of the same events - with the child's experience written by a former fostered child - and in doing so reveals the very good reasons why traumatized children behave as they do. The book explores the misunderstandings that grow between parents and their children, and provides comfort to the reader - you are not the only family going through this! Full of insights from a family and others who have really been there, this book gives you advice and strategies to help you and your family thrive.

Play therapy expert Terry Kottman and her colleague Kristin Meany-Walen provide a comprehensive update to this spirited and fun text on integrating Adlerian techniques into play therapy. Clinicians, school counselors, and students will find this to be the definitive guide for using Adlerian strategies with children to foster positive growth and effective communication with their parents and teachers. After an introduction to the basics of the approach and the concepts of Individual Psychology, the stages of Adlerian play therapy are outlined through step-by-step instructions, detailed treatment plans, an ongoing case study, and numerous vignettes. In addition to presenting up-to-date information on trends in play therapy, this latest edition emphasizes the current climate of evidence-based treatment and includes a new chapter on conducting research in play therapy. Appendixes contain useful worksheets, checklists, and resources that can be easily integrated into practice. Additional resources related to this book can be found in the ACA Online Bookstore at www.counseling.org/publications/bookstore and on Terry Kottman’s website encouragementzone.com. *Requests for digital versions from the ACA can be found on wiley.com. *To request print copies, please visit the ACA website here. *Reproduction requests for material from books published by ACA should be directed to [email protected].

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

Basing their work on the idea that psychoanalytic therapy and technique require more rather than less from the therapist, the Novicks explore the crucial role of parents' work in child and adolescent treatment. They show that child and adolescent therapies have two goals_resto...