This chapter considers what the child and family's experience might be of the relationships between these people, and wondering how those relationships will affect the interactions that the professionals have with the child and family. Systemic curiosity helps us explore not only what each person in the network can offer, but also what will be most useful to the child and carers at a particular time. The child's carers can play a key role in helping the network maintain a coherence of approach over time. Psychodynamic colleagues have focused on the child–carer dyad, while systemic colleagues have drawn attention to the impact of the wider network of relationships and the cultural and social contexts in which the child is situated. A recurring and connected theme has been the importance for the child/young person of a period of time in stable relationships with safe adults.

There is a significant evidence base for the role of brief therapies in working with attachment disorder. Attachment disorder can appear in a number of guises within therapy and can manifest wherever individuals consider themselves in relation to the other in a relationship. Cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) has demonstrated that it can be effective in clients with attachment avoidance and depressive symptoms compared to interpersonal therapy whereas a comparative study with anxious adolescents demonstrated equivalent outcomes when CBT was combined with family therapy. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is probably one of the most effective evidence-based therapies for working with attachment disorders. Neurolinguistic psychotherapy (NLPt) has demonstrated effectiveness in enabling self-care behaviours and de Miranda and colleagues were able to demonstrate positive changes in …

This chapter presents the case study of Dan, an eleven-year-old fifth-grader in a Boston public elementary school, who is Identified by his teachers and classmates as the biggest bully in the school. Both the external and internal data were subjected to two kinds of analyses, a qualitative examination of themes and a quantitative analysis of developmental levels in the components of the friendship framework. The interview data indicate that Dan does not identify himself as a bully, despite his quite sophisticated understanding of the role of fighting in fifth-graders' interpersonal relationships. Jimmy, Dan's partner in pair counseling, discussed Dan's fighting in the school context several times in the course of his fighting interview. In terms of developmental analysis, Dan showed an uneven pattern across the three psychosocial domains of interpersonal understanding, skills, and personal meaning, but these patterns …

Abstract Concepts from functional theories of emotions are integrated with principles of skill development to produce a theory of emotional development. The theory provides tools for predicting both the sequences of emotional development and the ways emotions shape development. Emotions are characterised in terms of three component models: (a) the process of emotion generation from event appraisal, (b) a hierarchy of emotion categories organised around a handful of basic-emotion families, and (c) a characterisation of emotions in terms of prototypic event scripts. The basic emotions and the positive vs. negative hedonic components of emotions function as constraints or organisers that shape behaviour whenever an emotion is activated. Through these patterning effects, emotions shape both short-term behavioural organisation and long-term development. The skill-development component of the theory explains how, as children grow, they construct and control increasingly complex skills—which affect many aspects of emotion, from appraisal to emotional self-control. These skills can be characterised in terms of a series of developmental tiers and levels; they are not fixed traits of the child but instead are affected by assessment conditions and emotional action tendencies. The developmental process gradually moves from basic, species-specific emotions to culture-specific, subordinate-category emotions and the complexities of adult emotional experiences. The theory provides a set of conceptual and methodological tools to predict and assess emotional development. It also indicates how emotional development fits with other aspects of systematic change in the organisation of behaviour.