Filial therapy: Description and rationale.

Filial therapy involves training parents, in groups of 6 to 8, to conduct play sessions with their emotionally disturbed young children, using an orientation and methodology modeled after client-centered play therapy. After training, the parents conduct their play sessions at home while continuing their weekly group meetings. Parents' sessions with their therapist begin with discussion of the play sessions, but may extend to any other areas that are emotionally relevant. Preliminary experience with 2 groups suggests that this type of method is deserving of further exploration as a method of increasing leverage of professional resources, and as a tool for gaining further insight into children's fantasy and parent-child relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship enhancement versus a traditional approach to therapeutic/preventative/enrichment parent-adolescent programs.

Assigned 108 mothers (mean age 40 yrs) and daughters (mean age 13.4 yrs), mostly low in educational and socioeconomic status, to receive no treatment, a discussion-oriented traditional treatment, or a Relationship Enhancement (Parent Adolescent Relationship Development) treatment. There was no improvement without treatment. Participation in the traditional treatment—designed to improve (a) specific communication skills, (b) general communication patterns, and (c) the general quality of the relationship—resulted in improvement on 3 of the 5 measures of (c). The improvement on 1 of these measures raised them above their no-treatment counterparts at posttreatment. Ss in Relationship Enhancement improved significantly and reached higher levels than Ss in both other conditions on each of the measures assessing areas (a), (b), and (c). In addition to concluding that Relationship Enhancement is superior to a traditional discussion-oriented treatment, it can be concluded that a significant portion of its effectiveness stems from the particular methods it employs rather than from nonspecific factors such as experimenter demand, placebo, attention, and thank-you effects. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Filial therapy into the 21st century.

Discusses filial therapy (FT) which might seem new to many child and family therapists. Yet training parents to play therapeutically using this child-centered approach with their children has a long track record that demonstrates it is an effective way to work with children and their parents together. It is noted that while the method was waiting to gain broader recognition and acceptance by practicing play and family therapists, advocates in academic settings were testing its efficacy. As FT is becoming more known and widely used by practitioners, it has attained the status of an "empirically supported" or "evidence based" or "empirically validated" treatment. All of these terms mean the same thing: a treatment that rests on good research, with results that show its efficacy, one that can be replicated by practitioners who can achieve comparable positive effects using it. Such terms concern anyone familiar with issues related to health care insurance. The slow start of FT, then, has become an advantage for the therapy and its users. Only rarely does a treatment arrive already backed by empirical support of efficacy. The remainder of this article will explain how this desirable state has come about. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Child-centered play therapy.

Presents child centered play therapy (CCPT), including the rationale, basic tenets and effectiveness of the approach. The stages of CCPT are described. As the name suggests, CCPT focuses on the child and not on his or her problems. Most children not only thrive in the play environment, but with the therapeutic contributions of the therapist, go to reach higher levels of maturity and adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A symposium on evaluation of training for consultation.

Papers from a symposium during the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal in 1973 describe programs for training students to consult in a variety of settings with a variety of goals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal skill training for dating couples: An evaluation of an educational mental health service.

In a previous study by S. Schlein (1971) of a preventative mental health program which stressed relationship improvement by maximizing empathy and self-disclosure, the efficacy of the program in improving communication and the general quality of the relationship between 48 college dating couples was demonstrated. The present reanalysis of Schlein's data shows that the experimental group, compared to the control group, also improved significantly on 2 key behavior rating scales by R. R. Carkhuff which are widely used to assess the efficacy of general helping relationship skills. As a result of less than 20 hrs of training, participants moved from providing levels of skills typical of college students to levels provided by typical counselors. The Empathy scale was highly correlated with 2 other Carkhuff scales, Respect and Immediacy. The trained Ss also showed a significantly greater increase in self-disclosure. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)