This eloquent book describes 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 cutting-edge research on early development, attachment, neurobiology, and trauma.

366 pgs

"This is a thoughtful and insightful work from pioneers in the field. The book provides rich, enlightening descriptions, along with useful principles. Preventative and early intervention efforts that build parent–child relationships strengthen the foundation for future development."

-Stanley I. Greenspan, MD, Chair, Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders; founder and past president, Zero to Three

"Lieberman and Van Horn present an extremely sensitive and comprehensive understanding of how their relationship-based approach to therapy can lead both child and parent toward positive mental health. Readers learn how to implement this important therapeutic intervention, with whom to use it, and variations in its use across different systems, such as child welfare and the judicial system. All mental health practitioners working with young children will benefit from the vivid clinical examples that bring to life the process of change."

-Joy D. Osofsky, PhD, Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center

"This long-awaited book definitively describes child–parent psychotherapy, one of the most important and effective interventions in infant mental health. The authors are master clinicians who repeatedly place the reader in the trenches of clinical dilemmas and never disappoint with their thoughtful considerations of what transpires there. With clear and illuminating prose and richly evocative vignettes, this book is 'must' reading for child clinicians."

-Charles H. Zeanah, MD, Sellars Polchow Professor and Vice Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Tulane University Health Sciences Center