Product Description

This book provides a systematic account of parental behaviour and the means of identifying and addressing inadequate parenting. It is intended for professionals who work with children or adults who were harmed as children, and its central concern is with parents who endanger their children or whose children may endanger themselves or others. Understanding and helping troubled parents to become secure and balanced people is of crucial importance for the parents themselves, for their children and for society at large. This book is a guide to understanding parents as people who have children - as opposed to seeing them as existing solely in terms of their ability to fulfill their children's needs.This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 analyses the information processing that underlies behaviour, with the examples of dangerous and violent parental behaviour. It connects the emerging cognitive neurosciences with parenting, child protection and forensic psychology.Part 2 delineates a gradient of distortions of information processing that result from with increasing exposure to danger and that result in increasingly dangerous behaviour. It is new in providing a dimensional structure, based on information processing, to disparate examples of inadequate to extremely dangerous childrearing.Part 3 addresses prevention, treatment, and forensic decision-making. It breaks new ground in tying information processing to implications for selecting treatment strategies. A particularly important issue is addressing when particular treatments might cause harm.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98834 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 381 pages

Customer Reviews

Using attachment theory with families...
For social workers and other professionals wanting to develop their skills in using attachment theory to help preserve families this book is most highly recommended. Along with Kate Cairns in the UK and Dan Hughes in the USA, Patricia Crittenden provides one of the most useful descriptions of how attachment theory based child welfare interventions can work.
The book contains useful diagrams to put in a diary and many of her ideas appear as timely jewels e.g. her six ideas about improving the safety of children and families on pp.336-338 in relation to 'Baby P'.
If you don't buy into the current UK social work-by-management mentality and you want to know more about using attachment theory to support parents in their parenting this book is for you...

Raising Parents: Attachemnt, Parenting and Child Safety.
This book contains much that is helpful and interesting to anyone working within the psyciatric therapy field. However, unfortunately it is not well written, it is difficult and often frustrating to wade through the over wordy text, the second half is better than the first but this might just be (for those who persevere that far) that one becomes used to the verbose style of writing. Some good ideas but not much original thought, what a pity Ms McKinsey Crittenden didn't have a better command of language.