brief family therapy homework planner

brief family therapy homework planner

The Importance of Family Therapy in Homework Planning

1. Introduction

Family Therapy is a type of psychotherapy that studies families and their individual members. It is primarily concerned with identifying and addressing the root cause of its clients’ dilemmas. Just as the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit of a mango tree grow from a continuous unique source – the seed; the family unity is derived from common ancestors. Each member of the family system is important and their actions may have an influence on each other. A child’s academic performance is no exception, it is influenced by factors related to genetics, school, and family. Baughal et al., (1996) found a significant positive genetic correlation between scholastic ability and social competence; Kaplan, (1992) reported improvements in verbal performance and reading scores resulting from early blood lead interventions. Studies conducted by researchers have proven that the input of social agents other than the child influences academic performance as well. Each of these sources informs and creates the individual who has ability or struggle.

A significant percentage of young people experience temporary failure with their studies at some time during the course of their school career. National statistics reveal that British Columbia seniors fail at least 2.4 courses of their required courses in grade 12. St. John Ambulance reported October 2010 statistics that showed group suicides were the second leading cause of death among 15-19 years old (19.9 deaths for every 100,000 youths). While students who eventually succeed in passing their high school receive numerous material and financial rewards; students who failed may experience varying degrees of emotional and psychological trauma. It is essential for parents to seek professional help immediately to plan and reduce the impact of school-related challenges on their child.

2. Benefits of Family Therapy in Homework Planning

Conducting IEP meetings in a family therapy setting allows for a conversation about the student’s future to be implemented into the student’s IEP. When families are included in the IEP process, positive relationships with the family are increased, and the student is given support at home as well as at school. When parents are involved early in the education of their child and the planning for their post-school life, they tend to remain involved and invested in their child’s success – at school and beyond. In fact, a child in a family with an involved parent, regardless of socioeconomic status, receives educational benefits from that involvement. Working collaboratively with schools, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as therapists possess a repertoire of skills that are uniquely suited to assist students and their families identify ways to work towards goals outlined in the Individual Family Service Plan (IFSP) or IEP.

While the role of therapists in the Individual Education Program (IEP) process is not directly utilized, families that meet with the school team create more positive relationships with the school and increase family engagement. Family therapy can support the IEP process by creating understanding about how students can eventually move out and become more independent once their education is finished. Once this language is created with the student’s family and written into the IEP, action can be taken to move in that direction. By helping both families and therapists understand how language development is the best method for increasing independence, therapists are facilitating the eventual transition of the student out of the family home and into independent living situations.

3. Strategies for Effective Family Therapy Homework Planning

It’s important to have clearly defined therapy goals before each session closes. These help keep attention focused and provide a road map for intervention. Clients, including families, often come for therapy with different goals in mind although the clinician may have accompanying therapeutic goals that are equally important or more so. These identified treatment goals (measurable, observable, and concrete) become the work of the therapist in developing homework suitable for the completion outside of session. As in any type of therapy, the number of therapy goals in a single treatment session or a series of sessions vary but can be increased depending on the experience and ability of the therapist and the nature of the case. On the average, no more than five are considered being worthwhile to have. If there are more than five, the level of therapy focus could be too diluted to be therapeutically meaningful in cases of short-term therapy without follow-up sessions for multiple weeks, or open-ended therapy.

Strategies for effective homework planning must necessarily be individualized to address the numerous variables that exist in the context of therapy with families. Successful homework formulation is based on sound clinical understanding, insight, and experience with the family and its unique structure and organization. Conversely, therapeutic challenges inherent in a case may suggest areas of homework design that may prove therapeutic. Given these variables, it is impossible to identify specific steps that will work in any given case all the time. However, a number of strategies that might facilitate the process for the clinician are described below. With this in mind, the strategies offered are for illustrative purposes primarily and are not meant to substitute for an individualized clinical understanding of the work with any specific case.

4. Overcoming Challenges in Family Therapy Homework Planning

The importance of family therapy homework is commonly accepted by therapists today. While there are many different aims of therapy, homework completion can be a remarkable predictor of the outcomes of therapy. It is also important to consider planning homework that can be met by anyone in group therapy. In order to identify some of the parlors of new dialectic, this section and the next are a folktale that wants to take into account that the practical topic concepts are specialized with the concept of just naming other problem statements in the pursuit of practical topics by the parents. There are these of that which are relative practical topics for family therapy.

Infradiazilec’s (1996) concept of practical topics outlines the overlapping of provisional practical challenge, historical background, anarchic or null challenge dialectics, and empirical science. These concepts help in planning the initial conversation in family therapy, but they are necessary when entering into the unknown. Planning therapy leads to many questions. This discussion presents a set of challenges in family therapy homework planning: finding others’ pleasure or aid. I will evaluate how the concept of practical topics focuses on the delicate dance involved in planning family therapy homework, and I will introduce references throughout the text to contextualize the challenging of homework planning and focus on being able to engage the dialectic of practical topics in the subtle movements of achieving practical gain in conversation.

5. Conclusion

It remains important for researchers, educators, and pediatric practitioners to better understand the importance of routines in child functioning. It provides a more comprehensive understanding of the family ecology of rearing children with ADHD and coexisting conditions. Significantly, it allows us to speak to etiological aspects of patterns of dysfunction and offers clear and obvious targets for intervention in both well-child research and the ADHD population. Our future research findings have the potential to inform what we know about other conditions with respect to the routines and family ecology. Given the large pediatric populations in which we are working, we are generally unable to collect detailed DSM diagnoses, but potentially disruptive patterns of family arrangements—frequent hospitalization, frequent trips to medical subspecialists, etc.—are often indicated in the available electronic health record data. Recall that we are not always querying systems from the same hospital, and frequently not querying hospital records, so some of the trip information may be missed in our working dataset.

In this article, we provide an overview of our current knowledge of the family routines and habits of children with ADHD and their families. We have examined several large pediatric populations with DSM-diagnosed youth with ADHD, typically developing controls, and youth with a variety of comorbid conditions. Across these studies, bioecological systems contribute to the daily routines of children: individual child and parent characteristics, medical and psychiatric conditions, and broader societal influences impact the ways in which families plan routines for their children. At the same time, these child-specific features are predictors of the characteristics of the family routines. Patterns of routines, such as sleep, mealtime, physical activity, and media, have varied across the population groups, and mental health symptoms are consistent predictors of routine characteristics in the ADHD youth, even while controlling for demographic variables.