Children in Family Contexts, Second Edition Perspectives on Treatment

Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, this text and professional resource provides a practical guide to family-based therapy for childhood emotional and behavioral problems. Presented are innovative assessment and treatment strategies that take into account children's developmental needs, different family forms, health and environmental challenges, and relationships with larger systems. Reflecting 15 years of clinical advances and the changing contexts of family life, the second edition features many new chapters and new authors. New topics include gene-environment interactions, integrating family therapy with child pharmacotherapy, working with foster families, and treating disrupted attachments.

Lee Combrinck-Graham, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, New Haven, Connecticut. Her training at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic under Salvador Minuchin's direction led her always to wonder, "How can you work with children without their families?" She is still wondering more than 30 years after finishing her training, but she has learned that many do not see it this way; that question became the basis for this book. Dr. Combrinck-Graham lives and works in Fairfield County, Connecticut, a county with some of the greatest wealth in the United States, yet her work as a psychiatric consultant to family service agencies takes her into inner-city homes and schools. This work, though often executed with a prescription pad, affirms daily the importance of social context in understanding and treating the most confounding of child and adolescent emotional and behavioral problems.