Psychotherapy with Infants and Young Children: Repairing the Effects of Stress and Trauma on Early Attachment

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.

Table of 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