Creating New Families: Therapeutic Approaches to Fostering, Adoption and Kinship Care

Synopsis:

Creating New Families is intended to reflect the practice of the specialist, multi-disciplinary Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic. The team is firmly rooted in an approach which values inter-disciplinary working for the contribution which the thinking of each discipline makes to the overall endeavour with the child and family. It also places great importance on multi-agency collaboration, especially with social services and education, without which no intervention with this group of children can succeed. The book represents the differing ways in which members contribute to the work of the team, with individual and joint accounts by clinicians of the ways in which their therapeutic practice has evolved and about the theoretical thinking on which it is based.

Description:

‘A volume which comprehensively examines the experiences and needs of looked-after and adopted children and their families and those in kinship care, long or short-term, is long overdue. The book describes work over many years based in the specialist Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic...
The sensitivity, depth and wisdom shown in the work and therapeutic case studies described in these pages express, often in moving detail, what has been learned from long experience. The book offers enlightened and hopeful ways of engaging with the particular challenges and difficulties involved in creating permanence for those whose lives have been fractured, be it by neglect, rejection, abuse, loss – by any or all of these.’
Margot Waddell, from the Series Editor’s Preface

Contributors:
Professor Lionel Hersov, Rita Harris, Sally Hodges, Sara Barratt, Miriam Steele, Hamish Canham, Laverne Antrobus, Juliet Hopkins, Margaret Rustin, Julia Granville, Louise Emanuel, Graham Music

About the Tavistock Clinic Series:
Founded in 1920, The Tavistock Clinic is recognised and respected as one of the world’s leading psychoanalytically–based psychotherapy centres. It became part of the National Health Service in 1948. It is a mental health institution with three principal departments – Child and Family, Adolescent, and Adult – and is also one of Britain’s foremost training institutions and a pioneer in infant observation research. The Tavistock Clinic Series, written in a clear and accessible style, makes available the clinical and theoretical work that has been most influential at the Tavistock. Future volumes will examine such topics as anorexia, infant mental health, group
work, and work with the elderly.

Notes about the author(s):

Jenny Kenrick was until recently a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Clinical Tutor for the clinical training in child psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. She was a member of the Fostering and Adoption team and, with Lorraine Tollemache, was co-convenor of the Fostering and Adoption workshop. She has developed a particular interest in, and has written about, children in transition.

Lorraine Tollemache is an adoptive parent. She is trained as a teacher, a social worker and a psychotherapist. Until recently she worked as a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Social Work in the Child and Family Department at the Tavistock. She was a co-founder with Caroline Lindsey of the Fostering and Adoption team, and a co-convenor of the Fostering and Adoption workshop with Jenny Kenrick. She established trainings for social workers in this field of work under the umbrella title of ‘Children in Transition’. They are now part of the Tavistock MA in Advanced Social Work.

Dr Caroline Lindsey is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Systemic Family Psychotherapist. She worked full-time until recently at the Tavistock Clinic, London, where she previously chaired the Child and Family Department. She worked as Consultant to Camden Social Services for many years and subsequently established the Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department, together with Lorraine Tollemache. She was previously Chair of the Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She chaired the External Working Group on Mental Health and Psychological Well-being for the Children’s National Service Framework and is currently involved in a review of progress of CAMHS NSF implementation. She now works in a private and voluntary capacity.