ABSTRACT
Child therapists tend to interview children without adults present and family therapists often leave out children, especially young ones. This chapter outlines briefly some considerations about the use of play and about the office set-up, and then offers general guidelines and specific suggestions to help therapists keep children in their families during assessment and treatment sessions. Sometimes the therapist may want to interview the children without the parents present in order to directly intervene in the sibling relationship without the impediment of the force field created by the adults. The creative therapist who wishes to work simultaneously with children and adults can invent fresh ways of talking and playing that will serve almost any therapeutic purpose guided by almost any general theory. The challenge for family and child therapists in conducting whole family sessions is to discover how to simultaneously involve family members who are at different levels of development.
