Working with Parents in Child Psychotherapy

Grounded in decades of clinical experience, this empathic, practical book presents a research-informed framework for delivering parent guidance as a stand-alone intervention or adjunct to child therapy. Elisa Bronfman and Johanna D. Sagarin delineate flexible coaching strategies to enhance family relationships and parenting skills and find new solutions to struggles around discipline, homework, bedtime, meals, screen time, and other daily routines. The approach can be tailored for parents dealing with any child mental health concern or behavioral challenge. Assessment, treatment planning, clinical decision making, and progress monitoring are all discussed in step-by-step detail. Packed with illustrative case material, the book features 34 reproducible clinical tools that can be photocopied or downloaded.

Elisa Bronfman, PhD, is Senior Staff Psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she specializes in supporting children, teens, and families coping with medical illness. Since joining the hospital in 1998, she has provided training, supervision, and individual and family psychotherapy, and has run numerous patient and caregiver groups targeting a range of child issues. Dr. Bronfman is also Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is coauthor of the Atypical Maternal Behavior Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE), a research tool used to assess parent/n-/infant attachment, on which she provides training nationally and internationally, and of journal articles and books on a range of topics.

Johanna D. Sagarin, PhD, is Internship Coordinator in the Clinical Counseling Psychology program at Assumption University, where she also teaches undergraduate psychology courses, and is a clinical psychologist in private practice. Previously, Dr. Sagarin was Vice President of Children’s Friend, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she directed a community mental health clinic for youth and families for close to two decades. In this setting, she helped develop specialized programs in grief and in working with LGBTQIA+ youth and their families. She has supervised and consulted with many clinicians, has been active in university-level teaching for many years, and has given numerous trainings and workshops for professionals and the public.