Abstract

Mindful Therapeutic Care for Children is an accessible guide to using mindfulness and reflection to improve the quality of care for vulnerable children.

Drawing on ideas from attachment theory and neuroscience, Mindful Therapeutic Care for Children explains terms like mindfulness and reflective practice, their importance in the therapeutic care of children and how the theory behind them can provide a key to understanding children's behaviour. This book discusses how the mental and emotional environment around children affects them, and how practising mindfulness can help us generate more supportive environments. The author also features an 'Awareness Pentagon' model for reflective practice, an original tool developed through her training designed to help you to approach cases critically and to focus more effectively on the child's needs.

This practical book provides psychologists, therapists, social workers and other professionals working with children, as well as foster carers and adoptive parents with useful tools to develop their capacity for mindful care.

Dr Joanna North is a chartered psychologist, psychotherapist and expert witness who works in a private practice specialising in assessing children and developing their therapeutic care plans. She has over 20 years of experience working with young people with behavioural difficulties and children in care. She lives and works in the United Kingdom.
This useful and practical book is based on a simple, yet powerful idea: as children's minds mirror their mental and emotional environment, those of us who support troubled children can do so best if we are reflective and mindful of our own minds. Thinking about our own thinking and knowing how we function in response to life's events creates a more constructive and conscious environment for a developing child. Writing in a wonderfully reflective style that is entirely congruent with the message about the practical importance of reflection, Dr North integrates different theoretical perspectives and provides building blocks of information to promote mindfulness and practical exercises to help us further develop reflective practice.
Chris Taylor, Clinical Service Manager, Bryn Melyn Care, UK, with special interests in attachment disorganization and mentalization
This book states on the cover that it is aimed at professionals who work with children but also parents and carers... Dr. North's style is conversational in tone which makes this a very accessible book... it is not so much a book about learning techniques; rather it is about learning another way of thinking about the work we do with the children in our care... by the end of the book I felt I had learned a lot and gained some insights which I can take directly into my practice....I would recommend it enthusiastically to professionals, parents and carers who want to understand more about themselves and the young people they work with and care for.
Nurturing Potential/Potential Unleashed
I recommend this book as a core text in systemic practice. It is an impressive accessible book, which for me says all the things I know and some I had forgotten about, in a focused and informative way. This would certainly help you order your thoughts as a busy practitioner and reflect. For practitioners, it is a social work energiser for direct work!
Simon Howard, Senior Lecturer in Social Work and CPD, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Inspired by Dan Siegel's celebration of the mindful therapist, Joanna North's book usefully explores ways in which parents and practitioners can develop ways of being mindful of their own selves as they engage and connect with children whose histories have been blighted by disadvantage and distress. She rightly points out that the more we understand the complexities of our own minds as well as the minds of the children with whom we relate, the more likely it will be that they, too, will develop selves that are reflective and well regulated. This book is heartfelt as well as mindful, full of ideas and advice for parents, carers and child welfare professionals alike.
David Howe, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, University of East Anglia, Norwich