This practical handbook offers treatment guidelines for the behavioural and mental health problems of young children whose most intimate relationships are disrupted by the experience of violence. Practitioners from a variety of disciplines gain an understanding of the impact of violence and discover concrete intervention strategies to address the consequences of this experience for young children.

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.