Parents as Therapeutic Partners: Are You Listening to Your Child's Play?

by Arthur Kraft, Garry L. Landreth

Overview

This book teaches parents how to conduct play therapy with their own young children. Teaching parents to be play therapists enhances the efforts of the mental health professional, who now becomes a consultant to the parent-therapist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461629948
Publisher:	Aronson, Jason Inc.
Publication date:	05/01/1998
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

After teaching English in secondary schools in New York, Dr. Arthur Kraft became Coordinator of Psychological Services for the Ridgewood, New Jersey public schools during the 1960s, while completing a Ph.D. at Columbia University and obtaining Diplomate status in school psychology. He then relocated to California, where he served 26 years as Senior Psychologist for the Long Beach schools. He conducted filial therapy groups with parents both in Ridgewood and Long Beach. Dr. Kraft's book on the subject, entitled Are You Listening to Your Child, published in 1973, is the foundation for Parents as Therapeutic Partners. His journal articles include "The Child as Parent," "Discipline as Curriculum," "A Democratic Approach to Problem-Solving in Junior High School," and "Down with (Most) Special Education Classes," which advocated mainstreaming of handicapped students where possible before the trend became popular. Dr. Kraft's book on communication and problem solving in schools is The Living Classroom, published in 1975.

Garry L. Landreth, Ed. D., is a Regents Professor in the Department of Counselor Education at the University of North Texas, where he is founder and Director of the Center for Play Therapy, the largest play therapy training program in the nation. Dr. Landreth is a former Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association for Play Therapy and recipient of the prestigious Virginia Axline Distinguished Professional Award for his work in conceptualizing and promoting Child-Centered Play Therapy. His publications include Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship and Play Therapy Interventions with Children's Problems. Dr. Landreth has been a featured speaker at play therapy conferences throughout the United States and in Canada, China, Europe, and South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

Two master therapists give us the privilege of looking in on parents' play sessions with their own children and on their training sessions via moment-by-moment accounts. Enhancing these accounts are the enormously human and sometimes humorous, but always insightful and respectful, thoughts of the training and supervising authors. Topping off the thoroughly enjoyable education in basic child-directed play therapy is the sharing by both authors of annotated protocols of play sessions they have conducted. To complete the education, the book lays out principles and procedures of filial therapy and research results that lend impressive empirical support to the method. The value of engaging parents in this unique interaction shines through as they express new insights into their own and their children's behavior. Readers can actually expect to feel good after reading this book.

Louise Guerney

Parents as Therapeutic Partners proposes the perfect marriage of effective material from the world of play therapy with the vital concern for parent training. The essential healing element of play therapy is found in the special relationship between the child and the professional, but the need for parents to build relationship with their children is foundational. Recognizing that empowered children do indeed come from empowered parents, Kraft and Landreth bring together psychological truths and the angst of parenting with theory and practice, demonstrated by easy-to-understand examples. The book is written for parents and professionals; the true beneficiaries, however, will be the children.

Daniel S. Sweeney Ph.D.

Kraft and Landreth describe how parents can conduct child-centered play sessions with their young children, and they illustrate how the sessions can help resolve a variety of internalizing (e.g., overly fearful or timid) and externalizing (e.g., overly aggressive or negativistic) problems of childhood. This is a major contribution to the child therapy literature.

Charles E. Schaefer