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Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work

Working with Parents

There are relatively well-articulated theories and techniques for treatment of children and adolescents but the the primary challenge of this work is still to get the child or adolescent into treatment, do the work, finish in a timely fashion, and maintain the gains. There are many factors in the patient that affect this process. But many therapies never get started, or are interrupted, or terminate in an untimely fashion. We have found in our own work and in that of our students that a major reason is the lack of a clear model for clinical work with parents in conjunction with their child’s therapy. There is little agreement about the extent of the work, who should do it, what the goals are, and how to organize and structure it.
         In this book we suggest a model for working with parents of children of all ages – preschoolers through late adolescents -- through all the phases of treatment.

Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work by Kerry and Jack Novick is an extraordinarily important contribution. Their work effectively counters the decades-old resistance to caring ork with parents by child and adolescent psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Their work underscores the inevitable ongoing interaction between parent functioning and child development.” Leon Hoffman, Director, Pacella Parent child Center of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society

“In Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work, psychoanalysts Kerry Kelly and Jack Novick offer a theoretically rigorous yet highly practical and intuitively appealing framework for involving parents meaningfully in their children’s therapy. One of this volume’s many strengths lies in its use of numerous salient and well-crafted clinical illustrations derived from the authors’ extensive clinical and supervisory experiences. It also offers further elaboration and new applications of the Novicks’ earlier research on the ‘two-systems’ model. Indeed, because the work is so well-written, one nearly loses sight of the fact that it represents a bold new vision of the role of parents in the psychoanalytic treatment of child and adolescent patients.” Jerrold R. Brandell, Wayne State University School of Social Work and author of Psychodynamic Social Work

Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Finnish, and Hungarian.

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