Sharing Care: The Integration of Family Approaches with Child Treatment

A clinician faces a multitude of considerations when assessing a child patient. Foremost among these is that caring for the child entails caring for the family members involved with that child. The therapist must balance the competing needs and feelings of the child, parents, and family as a whole. By forming an alliance with all members of the family, the therapist is in a position to strengthen and enhance the ties between child, parents, and family during all phases of assessment and treatment, leading to a more effective therapeutic intervention. Paving the Way for Children's Success offers a model that will help clinicians achieve this alliance. The model presented in this book focuses on ways to integrate child assessment and treatment with that of their parents' and families' level of function. It uses the authors' unique concept of the Zones of Care to help clinicians assess this level of function. In turn, each of the four zones leads to a specific approach to treatment. The authors present how these treatment approaches to current internalizing and externalizing disorders in children and adolescents allow clinicians to integrate a wide variety of techniques to address most DSM-IV categories. Their approach stresses both symptom reduction and the cultivation of coping skills. It also integrates fiscal issues of treatment into the development of the alliance with the parents in resolving the presenting problem. Dr. Ziegler and Dr. Bush present the reader with practical, workable strategies for laying down strong diagnostic foundations for successful treatment, making Paving the Way for Children's Success a valuable resource for any clinician working with children and adolescents.