Person-Centred Work with Children and Young People is a book by practitioners for practitioners.
Love, respect and time for listening to children and young people are what the person-centred psychotherapists and psychologists contributing to this volume have in common. They do this in a multiplicity of settings including primary and secondary education, a pupil referral unit, voluntary agencies, adoption services, hospital, hospice, community and the streets.
Some focus on specific areas such as working with LGB young people, loss and bereavement, self-harm and child protection, emotional literacy in a school and work on the streets with rent boys. Some write about using different expressive media: psychodrama, sandplay and play therapy training and practice.
All contributors give examples of their work with particular children and young people, aged from two to eighteen. They all share something of how they embody person-centred theory in their work, often engaging with the systems which impact on their work in the therapy room. They are all imbued with person-centred qualities, values and principles including respect, acceptance, empathy, patience, love, commitment, care, attention, humility, courage, sensitivity, awareness and self-questioning. All describe how much they have learnt from working with children and young people.
The inherent political and systemic aspects of this work are highlighted throughout the book, which will encourage and inspire all those interested in what person-centred practice with children and young people might look and feel like.
Our own view is that modern childhood is in crisis—which itself perhaps reflects a crisis of adulthood more generally, and the milieus (family, educational, environmental) that we are creating for our children. These crises demand urgent consideration if the toxic juggernaut is to be halted and reversed. This welcome new book shows how person-centred practice can inform this consideration, and we wish it wide readership. The issues it raises and the responses it champions will be an essential aspect of the healthier future that we all wish to forge for children the world over.
Foreword, Richard House and Sue Palmer, November 2007
Pamela J Burry
Brian Thorne
Howard Kirschenbaum