Top Ten Tips for the First Year of Placement
By Deborah Gray, MSW, MPA, clinical social worker specializing in attachment, grief and trauma, and author of Attaching in Adoption and Nurturing Adoptions. Parents passionately…
Tag: grief
Top Tips for building supportive relationships with your ASD family and friends
By Ann Palmer, author of A Friend’s and Relative’s Guide to Supporting the Family with Autism. This list of top tips* is primarily for the extended family…
How can you help? A Friend’s and Relative’s Guide to Supporting the Family with Autism
Even the best-intentioned friends and relatives can sometimes get it wrong when communicating and interacting with individuals on the autism spectrum and their parents or…
Free to Download! Creative Drama activities to help children with emotional and behavioural problems
Here, drama therapist Penny McFarlane shares two fun useful activities from her latest book, Creative Drama for Emotional Support, that will enable parents, carers, teachers, youth workers and others to help…
VIDEO – Mindfulness Play: Reaching students on a deeper level, with Deborah Plummer
In this series of videos, Deborah Plummer discusses the careful construction of the emotional environment in which the games and activities in her existing books…
Holiday Help for Your Anxious Child – by Deborah Gray
Here are some helpful tips for adoptive parents and foster carers to ensure that holidays are fun for everyone—especially for the anxious child. By Deborah Gray, MSW, MPA,…
Supporting children when a parent is at the end of life – An Interview with Rachel Fearnley
“The news that a parent has a terminal illness generally presents the family with a huge crisis. Everything about family life is catapulted into a maelstrom, routines change and nothing appears to be predictable anymore. If children are not included in conversations about their parent’s illness and possible imminent death they are going to witness all the changes without having any ‘concrete’ knowledge to use as a marker. They will be aware of the changes and know that something is very different but will not be able to form a consistent narrative. As a result they are in danger of piecing together the information they have gleaned and making erroneous conclusions.”
Dynamic Play Therapy in Action – An Interview with Dennis McCarthy (Part 3)
” I hope readers will become less afraid of rocking the boat of authority that urges us to make the child talk in adult terms about what the adult world deems important to them. Rather than having children be obedient patients, I want to encourage us to attempt in our work to foster true self-possession, knowing how very hard it is to achieve. I urge us all to fight the tendency to negate emotion, to negate aggression, to negate anything and everything that pulsates with life and therefore stirs things up.”
Dynamic Play Therapy, Harnessing the power of collapse and renewal – An Interview with Dennis McCarthy (Part 2)
“With rare exceptions, the academic and professional world doesn’t support a dynamic approach to play therapy (or often the use of play in therapy at all). There is an ever-greater thrust to pathologize the child and the family and this is often where the therapist/therapy stops: diagnosis leads to stasis. This needn’t be so. We can and should have an understanding of what is going on in the child and in their life, but unless we then engage the child in real play, we have not accomplished much. Children need to be allowed to be children and speak their language not ours.”
Helping Things Fall Apart, The Paradox of Play – An Interview with Dennis McCarthy (Part 1)
“The deeper [sand]box, with its capacity for burying and sinking and erupting, fit the overall view I have developed which I call Dynamic Play Therapy. My approach is interactive and encourages and even provokes what I see as contained wildness in the service of healthy ego development and a natural sense of self-regulation. The work and my thinking about it still continue to evolve. Even as I write these words new ideas are surfacing based on sessions this week with several children. … My interest has been to understand how children experience their lives and best speak about them, knowing that their language is fundamentally different than ours as adults. They speak in images just as we dream in images. So I spend my days offering them materials and a safe space in which to speak thus.”