Main description:

This eloquent book presents an empirically supported treatment that engages parents as the most powerful agents of their young children's healthy development. Child-parent psychotherapy promotes the child's emotional health and builds the parent's capacity to nurture and protect, particularly when stress and trauma have disrupted the quality of the parent-child relationship. The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework together with practical strategies for combining play, developmental guidance, trauma-focused interventions, and concrete assistance with problems of living. Filled with evocative, "how-to-do-it" examples, it is grounded in extensive clinical experience and important research on early development, attachment, neurobiology, and trauma.

Contents:

1. When Development Falters: Putting Relationships First

2. Coping with Danger: The Stress-Trauma Continuum

3. Practicing Child-Parent Psychotherapy: Treatment Targets and Strategies

4. The Assessment Process

5. Not Quite Good Enough: Perturbations in Early Relationships

6. Ghosts and Angels in the Nursery: Treating Disturbances and Disorders

7. Variations in Child-Parent Psychotherapy

8. Lapses in Attunement: Failures in the Therapeutic Relationship

9. Integrating Child-Parent Psychotherapy with Other Service Systems

10. Closing Thoughts: Taking Perspective