Staying Attached: Fathers and Children in Troubled Times

ISBN-13: 9781782205944 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 320 str.

Gill Gorell Barnes

Opis

This book is about the changing social contexts for fathering in the United Kingdom since the end of the Second World War and the social moves from patriarchal fatherhood to the multiple ways of doing "dad." The book questions why fathers have been marginalized by therapists working with children and families. It proposes that theories of psychotherapy, including attachment theory, have failed to sufficiently take fathers' love for their children and the reality of changing social fatherhoods into account, consequently affecting related practice. Different contemporary family structures and multiple variations of relationship between fathers and children are considered in this book.

Many fathers, brought up within earlier patriarchal frameworks for viewing fatherhood are still trying to exercise these structures within the contexts of rapid change in expectations of men as fathers. They may find themselves in troubled and oppositional relations with partners and often children. Examples are given for thinking about fathers in different relationship transitions, including "non-live-in" fatherhoods, re-entering children's lives after long absences, fathering following acrimonious divorce, and a range of social fatherhoods. Depression and mental illness are addressed. Work developed with fathers to keep them connected to their children, both in and out of the family court, is described and explored.

Recenzje

"This book is a significant contribution to the literature on fathers. The vexed and challenging issues family therapists face in working with fathers, where there is some level of alienation, isolation, and/or violence and/or mental illness, are discussed from a clinical, theoretical, and research perspective. I feel this is a generous book in that Gill Gorell Barnes describes both her experience and development as a psychiatric social worker and family therapist, who has been practicing since the 1960s and has been teaching and publishing since the 1980s. Rarely are we given a text that reflects the work of a professional career. The book also makes reference to the significance of Gill Gorell Barnes’s own father in her own emotional development. She describes this as being ‘an inner guide to believing in the potential nurturing capacity of men’ (p. xxv). However, she also is not naive about the dangers of violence and patriarchal thinking that severely interfer and restrict thoughtful relationships." --Sally Young, Child and Youth Mental Health Service, Children’s Health Queensland, Queensland in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy

Spis treści

Series Editors’ Foreword , Preface , Introduction , The changing social context for fathering in the United Kingdom in my lifetime: the family and fathers remembered following the Second World War , Attachment theory, child development research, and mothers’ and fathers’ connections with children in everyday life , Becoming a father in non-live-in fatherhoods , Getting connected after a long absence—fathers re-entering their children’s lives: conflicts of interest, belief, and attachment , Fathers, children, and conflicts in family arrangements following divorce , Processes that alienate one part of the family from another , Fathers, stepfathers, and complex families , Violence in couple and family systems: anxious attachment and disorganised love, power, and control , Working with couples: developing skills in managing unregulated emotion , Working with fathers within family court proceedings: disorganised attachments and violent outcomes , Mental illness, fathers, and families , Reconciliation and forgiveness

O autorze

Gill Gorell Barnes