Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Clinician's Guide for Supporting Parents constitutes a principles-based guide for clinicians to support parents across various stages of child and adolescent development. It uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as an axis to integrate evolution science, behaviour analysis, attachment theory, emotion-focused and compassion-focused therapies into a cohesive framework. From this integrated framework, the authors explore practice through presenting specific techniques, experiential exercises, and clinical case studies. - Explores the integration of ACT with established parenting approaches - Includes a new model - the parent-child hexaflex - and explores each component of this model in depth with clinical techniques and a case study - Emphasizes how to foster a strong therapeutic relationship and case conceptualization from an acceptance and commitment therapy perspective - Covers the full spectrum of child development from infancy to adolescence - Touches upon diverse clinical presentations including: child anxiety, neurodevelopmental disorders, and child disruptive behavior problems, with special emphasis on infant sleep - Addresses how best to support parents with mental health concerns, such as postnatal depression - Is relevant for both novices and clinicians, students in psychology, social work and educational professionals supporting parents

Koa Whittingham, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland Cerebral Palsy and Rehabilitation Research Centre within the Child Health Research Centre at The University of Queensland, Australia. She is a registered psychologist in Australia with specialisations in both clinical and developmental psychology. She is also the author of Becoming Mum, a self-help book for the perinatal period grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy. Her research spans three key areas: parenting, neurodevelopmental disabilities, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and related approaches. She is passionate about the application of ACT to parenting research and intervention.