ABSTRACT
The shift in thinking about children and their problems from an individual to a family framework owes a considerable amount to the development of systemic family therapy approaches (Dallos and Draper, 2005). A core concept of these approaches is that problems in family members arise from the interactional processes between family members. As a typical example a child may be responding with anxiety to the tensions and conflicts between her parents. Alternatively, parents who are ill or distressed may not be able to offer their child the support and comfort she needs in order to deal with difficulties, such as conflicts or bullying at school, which can set up a process of escalating distress and sense of failure in a family. However, a systemic perspective is also applied more broadly to provide an overall view of the child’s various contexts – family, school, friendships and mental health services – to guide a package of clinical work which can combine clinical work directed at individual as well as family and organizational levels.
