Creating New Families

Creating New Families is intended to reflect the practice of the specialist, multi-disciplinary Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic. The team is firmly rooted in an approach which values inter-disciplinary working for the contribution which the thinking of each discipline makes to the overall endeavour with the child and family. It also places great importance on multi-agency collaboration, especially with social services and education, without which no intervention with this group of children can succeed. The book represents the differing ways in which members contribute to the work of the team, with individual and joint accounts by clinicians of the ways in which their therapeutic practice has evolved and about the theoretical thinking on which it is based.

Kenrick, Jenny

Series Editor's Preface -- Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction -- Theoretical Considerations -- A systemic conceptual framework -- Psychoanalytic framework for therapeutic work with looked-after and adopted children -- The "added value" of attachment theory and research for clinical work in adoption and foster care -- The uses of a neuroscientific perspective -- The role of psychiatric assessment and diagnosis -- Psychological assessment of looked-after children -- Psychotherapeutic Work with Children -- Work with children in transition -- Cognitive behaviour therapy -- Individual psychotherapy for late-adopted children: how one new attachment can facilitate another -- Where do I belong? Dilemmas for children and adolescents who have been adopted or brought up in long-term foster care -- Psychotherapeutic Work with Parents and Families -- Minding the gap: reconciling the gaps between expectation and reality in work with adoptive families -- Systemic work with families after adoption -- Kinship care: family stories, loyalties, and binds -- From tired and emotional to praise and pleasure: parenting groups for adoptive, foster, and kinship carers -- Consultative Work with Parents, Families, and Professionals -- Consultative work with professionals -- Therapeutic consultations about the transition into care and children in transition -- Contact with birth families: implications for assessment and integration in new families -- Work in Different Settings -- The contribution of organizational dynamics to the triple deprivation of looked-after children -- Children who cannot live in families: the role of residential care -- A Family's Perspective -- "Then there were four": learning to be a family