Main description:

Play Therapy and Families: A Collaborative Approach to Healing provides a thorough description of play from prominent academics, researchers, and relevant writers who review it historically. It contains a unique approach for helping families, outlining an in-depth review of play and its relevancy to healing for children and families, putting forth a brand new Collaborative Play Therapy Model. The application to healing and psychotherapy follows, outlining the directive and non-directive orientations to healing, models that are current in the literature, and selected family-based play therapy models.

An extensive overview of family therapy and associated models is presented as a foundation for the reader in order to relate play and family therapy from an academic point of view. This provides the theoretical background for the chapters on play therapy approaches that follow. Family play therapy addresses the inclusion of the family with techniques that contribute to healing. Narrative play therapy is presented with an in depth historical account and the phases of the narrative approach. Filial and theraplay models of play therapy are presented with an account of their development and focus on the phases of intervention for children and families. The book concludes with a sandtray approach to working with adoptive families, rounding out this collection's presentation of current and researched models of play therapy.

Contents:

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Play as a Voice for Our Children
Nancy Riedel Bowers and Anna Bowers
Chapter 2: Setting the Context-Play and its Therapeutic Application
Nancy Riedel Bowers
Chapter 3: Family Therapy
Kristin Trotter
Chapter 4: Family Play Therapy
Kristin Trotter
Chapter 5: Narrative Play Therapy with Families
Alan McLuckie and Melissa Rowbotham
Chapter 6: Filial Therapy and Theraplay
Evangeline Munns
Chapter 7: Working with Adoptive Families Using Sand, Water, Miniatures and a Sandtray
Theresa Fraser
Index
About the Authors