Children's Rights, Therapists' Responsibilities: Feminist Commentaries

Children's Rights, Therapists’Responsibilities: Feminist Commentaries addresses specific practice dimensions that will help therapists organize and resolve conflicts about working with children, adolescents, and their families in therapy. You'll find a collection of pieces on specific potentially problematic therapy conditions that allows you to easily turn to your area of interest for advice. Each chapter stands alone while building upon the big picture of feminist ethics and therapy with children and adolescents. Providing a feminist focus on the mental health rights and needs of children and adolescents, Children's Rights, Therapists’Responsibilities: Feminist Commentaries emphasizes our need to make the best decisions without letting personal prejudices, biases, experiences, needs, or desires cloud our judgment. A particular point of view exposes the tendency for therapists to work either with children and exclude parents, or to work with parents and exclude the children, and offers a feminist view of parents and children being treated together. Other helpful things you'll find include:

• critical analysis of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
• presentation and recommendation of the “Feminist Model of Ethical Decision-Making”
• information on respecting the human rights of the children with disabilities and children of color
• advice on the what, when, and how of talking about donor identity with children of lesbian parents
• description of a respectful approach to working with adolescent girls and strengthening their voices
• examination of a model designed to acknowledge competencies and develop alternative interventions in working with adolescents
• description of the effects of witnessing violence on children who have lived with domestic abuse
• examination of the “Children of Separation and Divorce Model”
  
  Co-edited by two daily in-the-trenches veterans of feminist therapy, Children's Rights, Therapists’Responsibilities: Feminist Commentaries has practical application for any practitioner who finds the therapy ethics of real needs and vague rights confusing. Family therapists, pediatric psychiatrists and nurses, psychologists, social workers, counselors, librarians, educators, child advocates, attorneys, and policymakers will all find valuable advice and guidance in this book.