Routledge Raising Parents: Attachment, Representation, and Treatment

Helping troubled parents to raise their children adequately is of crucial importance for parents, their children and society at large. Distressed parents have themselves often been endangered and, as a consequence, sometimes endanger their children either through maltreatment or through the effects of parental psychiatric disorder. Raising Parents explains how that happens and clusters parents in terms of the psychological processes that result in maladaptive childrearing. The book then delineates DMM Integrative Treatment in terms of assessment, formulation, and treatment. New formulations are offered for problems that have resisted treatment and cases demonstrate how the ideas can be applied in real treatment settings. The book closes with 10 suggestions for improving professionals’ responses to troubled families and endangered children. This edition of Raising Parents introduces DMM Integrative Treatment and demonstrates how to use it with vulnerable families. DMM Integrative Treatment is an interpersonal process and this book will be essential reading for clinicians from all disciplines, including psychiatry and psychology, social work, nursing and all types of psychotherapy. Review Crittenden exhorts mental health professionals to look closely and to see themselves as researchers constantly refining and testing hypotheses, rather than to apply oversimplified recipes for treatment or criteria of "success" ... Raising Parents is a solid contribution to the literature on family dynamics, and its usefulness is not limited to understanding populations of neglectful or abusive adults, or the children they hurt Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, PsyCRITIQUES The DMM is the most clinically sophisticated model that attachment theory has to offer at the present time. This book is the best introduction to the DMM that there is. It could hardly be anything other than a brilliant crystallisation of the model, given that the author is its originator. Crittenden is one of the great writers on the clinical applications of attachment theory. Almost all clinicians working with children and young people, or with their parents, will benefit from studying this text carefully. Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and Head of the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, UCL; Chief Executive, Anna Freud Centre. Patricia Crittenden’s Raising Parents: Attachment, Representation and Treatment- Second Edition is a book with a bold aim. It explains and illustrates applications of a new underpinning theory ( the Dynamic Maturational Model or DMM) that sets out to enhance our understanding of child development , refine our attempts to help parents whose behaviour harms their children, and assist in testing new hypotheses in both child development and treatment. The author draws on her vast clinical experience to guide the reader through each of these complex topics and offers us genuinely new insights on the way. Her compassion and sheer intellectual curiosity shine through, making this a book not only to enlighten but also to inspire. Ruth Gardner PhD FRSA is Advisor on Child Neglect at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, ( NSPCC, UK). The first edition of Raising Parents by Patricia Crittenden has been an essential text in an interdisciplinary graduate course I teach on development and psychopathology. Students relatively unfamiliar with attachment theory as well as those who felt they knew quite a bit were deeply engaged in learning about the Dynamic Maturational Model of attachment and adaptation, discussing the rich case material provided in Raising Parents, and wrestling with the clinical implications and applications of the theory. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book frequently changed how we all thought about, empathized with, and worked with troubled families. These students were hungry for more and I am pleased to say tha