Creative Interventions For Children Of Divorce

An innovative collection of therapeutic games, art techniques, and stories to help children of divorce express feelings, deal with loyalty binds, disengage from parental conflict, address anger and self-blame, and learn coping strategies. Includes a theoretical overview for practitioners, a sample treatment plan, and a reproducible handout to give parents. Also contains a ten-week curriculum that can be used in therapy or support groups. A much needed compilation for counsellors, therapists, and group facilitators.

Ages 4 to 8 years. This book is part of the Cory Series to help children cope with challenging issues. This version presents engaging activities to help very young clients cope with divorce. Cory, the central character in the story, helps children gradually confront and process their feelings and reactions related to the divorce. Therapeutic games, art, and other playful activities are incorporated to lower the threat level of therapy and engage children in treatment. Questions and re-enforcers are woven throughout the story to captivate and sustain the childs interest in the story, and to evaluate and encourage the childs integration of the material. Includes a reproducible story, activities, and detailed parent handouts.

This best-selling collection is filled with creative assessment and treatment interventions to help clients identify feelings, learn coping strategies, enhance social skills, and elevate self-esteem. A wealth of innovative tools for practitioners working with children in individual, group, and family counselling. Aimed at 4 to 16 year olds.

Bringing together an array of highly creative contributors, this comprehensive resource presents a unique collection of assessment and treatment techniques. Contributors illustrate how play, art, drama, and other approaches can effectively engage families and help them resolve complex problems. Practitioners from divergent theoretical orientations, work settings, or client specialisations will find a plethora of stimulating and useable clinical interventions in this book.

For guidance counselors, social workers, nurses and others who work closely with elementary students troubled by problems of divorce, this unique new resource presents 12 ready-to-use, school-tested group sessions with background information and reproducible materials to help children who are struggling to cope with and accept changes in their families. The sessions are preceded by guidelines for establishing divorce groups, ideas for beginning and ending each session, suggestions for responding to the confusion children may express, and case studies with actual examples of the children's questionnaires and artwork. Each of the 12 group sessions provides ready-to-use lesson plans and reproducible activity sheets that can be copied as many times as needed: general background on divorce, why parents marry and divorce, changes, two houses, feeling angry, feeling guilty, the grieving process, legal issues, stepparenting, a happy marriage, review, achieving closure.

"This volume provides a wonderful treasure-chest of appealing and practical aids to assist mental health practitioners in counseling bereaved school-age children. Numerous exercises and games are included that will encourage children to express their complicated feelings about the death of a loved one. Handouts for parents and teachers as well as guidelines for practitioners serve as important resources to assist adults in their efforts to help bereaved children." -- Nancy Boyd Webb. [from back cover].

This book is a "how to" manual for working with families in separation and divorce using an active, directive therapeutic process called Family Restructuring Therapy. This philosophy and effective process works well for the "normal" divorced family who need to learn new practices and patterns, and for the "high-conflict" family whose behavior patterns have become so maladaptive that the children's well-being is at risk. A valuable resource for mental health professionals, and also for lawyers and the Court when trying to decide what can be done with challenging parenting battles. It is clearly not a passive approach to counseling. If you're tired of witnessing the damage that conflict has on children and want to engage in the highly satisfying work of helping parents communicate effectively and seeing children relieved of the burden of picking sides, devour this book and get to work

MORE creative interventions to engage children, youth, and families in counselling and help them address issues such as feelings identification, anger management, social skills, and self-esteem. Includes techniques to manage challenging client behaviour. A practical resource for practitioners seeking innovative activities to add to their repertoire. Aimed at 4 to 16 year olds.