Presenting crucial knowledge and state-of-the-art treatment approaches for working with young children affected by trauma, this book is an essential resource for mental health professionals and child welfare advocates. Readers gain an understanding of how trauma affects the developing brain, the impact on attachment processes, and how to provide effective help to young children and their families from diverse backgrounds. Top experts in the field cover key evidence-based treatments--including child-parent psychotherapy, attachment-based treatments, and relational interventions--as well as interventions in pediatric, legal, and community settings. Special sections give in-depth attention to deployment-related trauma in military families and the needs of children of substance-abusing parents.

This eloquent book presents an empirically supported treatment that engages parents as the most powerful agents of their young children's healthy development. Child-parent psychotherapy promotes the child's emotional health and builds the parent's capacity to nurture and protect, particularly when stress and trauma have disrupted the quality of the parent-child relationship. The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework together with practical strategies for combining play, developmental guidance, trauma-focused interventions, and concrete assistance with problems of living. Filled with evocative, "how-to-do-it" examples, it is grounded in extensive clinical experience and important research on early development, attachment, neurobiology, and trauma.