Family therapy in a community mother and toddler project

Abstract

A home centred family therapy approach is described based on the McMaster model. This approach was applied in a controlled trial of three forms of intervention for mother and toddler problems. In this paper the experience of applying the approach is reported.There has been renewed concern in recent years about the mental health of the family of the preschool child (Brown and Harris, 1978;Richman, 1982;. Rates of psychiatric disorder have been found to be very high in these epidemiological surveys, between 25 and 40% for maternal disorder and around 15% for child disorder. In this paper we describe a community based family therapy approach to this problem.The work described here is part of a larger clinical trial in which three interventions designed to tackle the problems of mothers and toddlers are being compared with each other and with a control group. The three interventions are an intensive health visiting approach, in which a health visitor with skills in helping with psychological problems visits the family for a short term intervention (Brown et al., 1985; Rickelton et al., 1985); mother and toddler groups (report in preparation) and family therapy. Cases were alloted to these four regimes by random allocation. MethodThese methodological details are given so that the reader can identify the type of families that were seen in the study and compare them with his or her own practice.The study area This was an inner city area based on traditional ship-building and heavy engineering. Unemployment was high: over 30% in the largest of the five

Prevention of Psychiatric Disorders in Early Childhood

“…Another study in progress offering several alternative approaches to intervening with parents may provide a useful comparison because of its experimental design. Following the model of a successful program to evaluate different therapeutic approaches for school children (Kolvin et al, 1981), three types of prevention are being compared for mothers of pre-school children (Nicol, Stretch, Davidson & Fundudis, 1984;Koziarski, Hodgson & Nicol, 1986). Although this could be construed as a treatment study, it is included under prevention since the authors screened a population for maternal depression and child behavior problems, rather than treating cases which presented themselves for help.…”