Abstract

How can we help heal children who have been abused or neglected?

Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting details how children can be helped to recover with the use of Restorative Parenting, an innovative model informed by psychological and neurological understanding of trauma and its effects. It explains the critical role that people, relationships and the environment play in a child's recovery. It shows what constitutes a therapeutic environment, whereby a child experiences therapy not as one-to-one sessions but as a lived experience. The authors show how other components of the model - building therapeutic relationships, promoting positive education and encouraging clinically informed life style choices - are intimately linked, each critical to the re-parenting which the child undergoes.

This book will be welcomed by professionals working with children, including those in residential, health and foster care, psychology, education and health, as well as those commissioning services. The models, concepts and practices are transferable to public, private and charitable agencies.

Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting offers a coherent theoretical contribution, and a helpful addition to the range of literature on therapeutic residential interventions, that are so critical to meet the needs of the growing number of traumatised children and young people who find themselves 'looked after' on behalf of our society. As such, the book, and the model it expounds, emphasises the important role that residential care placements can offer in providing a vital 'time and space' in which young people can safely explore, and ultimately internalise positive experiences of the emotional health enhancing attachments that they need, with safe, caring and nurturing adults.
John Diamond, CEO, The Mulberry Bush Organisation
Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting provides a much-needed resource for anyone working with children suffering from the impact of traumatic or abusive parenting. Robinson and Philpot address the need for a more comprehensive approach to care, providing clinicians and caregivers with evidence-based skills for re-parenting a traumatized child.
Mary C. Walsh, D.Min., LMFT
Dr Chris Robinson is a clinical psychologist at Halliwell Homes. He provides ongoing consultation on the recovery of every child placed on the Halliwell recovery programme. He has extensive experience working in CAMHS, social services liaison, learning disability and latterly family and private law. Terry Philpot is a writer and journalist who has edited or written 15 books on social care from sex offending to the children's services. His latest books are 31 London Cemeteries to Visit Before You Die (2012) and Beside the Seaside: Brighton's People and Its Places (2015).
Having the responsibility of being the primary carer and homemaker for a child, you often find yourself looking for someone to reorient you with the needs of a young person. This book includes reminders of the subtle everyday things that make care personal. It describes methods and strategies as it shows how child-centred children's services can be, if these principles and practices are applied. Central to the book is that the professional task has to be more than a theory, more than a professional practice. It has to be a relationship, it's personal and it's a necessary precondition for positive development. Whatever you are doing at whatever time of day and wherever you are, this book can be there with you helping you to hold the child in mind so that every moment is one devoted to growth and development. It's a gem of a book.
Jonathan Stanley, Principal Partner, National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care and CEO, Independent Children's Homes Association