Over the past decade, grandparents have become primary caregivers for their grandchildren at an unprecedented rate. Drug/alcohol abuse, poor mental health, financial instability, chronic illness, and early death have left parents unavailable for childrearing, leaving their elder generation responsible for tending vulnerable children. While grandparents' resources have been overtaxed with this arrangement, family therapists have been caught off guard in adapting traditional family therapy methods to this population. This paper revisits Contextual Family Therapy for what it has to offer grandparents in crisis. The purpose is to restore appropriate "give and take" while compensating for a "skipped" parenting generation.
Typically, family therapy task interventions involve direct assignment of specific behaviors, which may or may not encourage client compliance. To enhance the clinician's probability of bringing about progress in treatment, this article broadens the parameters of task intervention to include (a) Direct versus Indirect, (b) Behavioral versus Nonbehavioral, and (c) Paradoxical versus Nonparadoxical dimension alternatives. The resulting 2 x 2 x 2 model, the Family Therapy Task Construction Paradigm, yields eight possible choices for end-of-the-session punctuation. Each option is linked to corresponding treatment contexts and illustrated with examples from productive case vignettes.
Family therapy is a process by which therapists help families identify and rectify dysfunctional patterns. A precise under standing and specification of the steps in the family therapy process is critical to helping therapists perform their craft better. A teain of family therapists and simulationists has developed a step by step description of the process of a family therapy session, based on the experience of expert therapists and the published literature. This description forms the basis for a simulation model which has been used in training new therapists. Simulation is an ideal tool for studying family therapy since both are based on systems theory. By observing these thera pists in action, the model is being validated and enhanced.
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