Creating New Families

Jenny Kenrick was until recently a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Clinical Tutor for the clinical training in child psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. She was a member of the Fostering and Adoption team and, with Lorraine Tollemache, was co-convenor of the Fostering and Adoption workshop. She has developed a particular interest in, and has written about, children in transition. Caroline Lindsey is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Systemic Family Psychotherapist. She worked full-time until recently at the Tavistock Clinic, London, where she previously chaired the Child and Family Department. She worked as Consultant to Camden Social Services for many years and subsequently established the Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department, together with Lorraine Tollemache. She was previously Chair of the Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She chaired the External Working Group on Mental Health and Psychological Well-being for the Children's National Service Framework and is currently involved in a review of progress of CAMHS NSF implementation. She now works in a private and voluntary capacity. Lorraine Tollemache is an adoptive parent. She is trained as a teacher, a social worker and a psychotherapist. Until recently she worked as a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Social Work in the Child and Family Department at the Tavistock. She was a co-founder with Caroline Lindsey of the Fostering and Adoption team, and a co-convenor of the Fostering and Adoption workshop with Jenny Kenrick. She established trainings for social workers in this field of work under the umbrella title of 'Children in Transition'. They are now part of the Tavistock MA in Advanced Social Work.

'A volume which comprehensively examines the experiences and needs of looked-after and adopted children and their families and those in kinship care, long or short-term, is long overdue. The book describes work over many years based in the specialist Fostering and Adoption team in the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic... 'The sensitivity, depth and wisdom shown in the work and therapeutic case studies described in these pages express, often in moving detail, what has been learned from long experience. The book offers enlightened and hopeful ways of engaging with the particular challenges and difficulties involved in creating permanence for those whose lives have been fractured, be it by neglect, rejection, abuse, loss - by any or all of these.'- Margot Waddell, from the Series Editor's Preface

• Series Editor’s Preface -- Foreword -- Preface -- Introduction -- Theoretical Considerations -- A systemic conceptual framework -- Psychoanalytic framework for therapeutic work with looked-after and adopted children -- The “added value” of attachment theory and research for clinical work in adoption and foster care -- The uses of a neuroscientific perspective -- The role of psychiatric assessment and diagnosis -- Psychological assessment of looked-after children -- Psychotherapeutic Work with Children -- Work with children in transition -- Cognitive behaviour therapy -- Individual psychotherapy for late-adopted children: how one new attachment can facilitate another -- Where do I belong? Dilemmas for children and adolescents who have been adopted or brought up in long-term foster care -- Psychotherapeutic Work with Parents and Families -- Minding the gap: reconciling the gaps between expectation and reality in work with adoptive families -- Systemic work with families after adoption -- Kinship care: family stories, loyalties, and binds -- From tired and emotional to praise and pleasure: parenting groups for adoptive, foster, and kinship carers -- Consultative Work with Parents, Families, and Professionals -- Consultative work with professionals -- Therapeutic consultations about the transition into care and children in transition -- Contact with birth families: implications for assessment and integration in new families -- Work in Different Settings -- The contribution of organizational dynamics to the triple deprivation of looked-after children -- Children who cannot live in families: the role of residential care -- A Family’s Perspective -- “Then there were four”: learning to be a family