ABSTRACT
The Marlborough Family Service offers a range of therapeutic and consultative work for children, teenagers, adults, couples, and families. The Marlborough is an all-age service, with the youngest client 2 days of age and the oldest 96 years old. The Marlborough is staffed by a multidisciplinary team of child, adult, and family therapists, social workers, teachers, nurses, clinical psychologist, and psychiatrists. All staff, however diverse their trainings and interests, share the basic values of the family systems approach. Within their living context, families and their individual members relate to friendship networks, to work spheres, to schools or nurseries, to religious or cultural institutions, to professional networks which enter their lives. A contextual approach attempts to address all these contexts, all the different systems and sub-systems of which the child, the adult, and the family are part. Many multi-problem families seem stuck in their habitual ways of interacting with one another around child-care tasks, play, outings, or relationship issues.
