Communicating Partners
Dr. James D. MacDonald's Website
Helping Parents Help Children. Programs for Parents, Therapists & Educators
Ira Glovinski, a psychotherapist, conducted a group parent therapy program with children with autistic and bipolar patterns. The training focused on teaching parents the five CP responsive strategies in play based therapy. The parents, at first were generally directive rather than responsive, dominating rather than balanced, mismatched in action and language, more task-oriented than play oriented, and more rigid than relaxed in expectations. The children were more passive than interactive, more nonverbal than verbal, played more alone than with others, showed more resistance than cooperation. In summary, the parent child pairs were rarely reciprocal, playful, or actively into each other's world. After a 12-week program with video demonstrations, live practice with children and coaching of parents, the parents and children were more interactive and communicative, spent more time playing than teaching. The children were more initiative and stayed in longer interactions, engaged the parents more in joint activities, and cooperated more readily. The majority of the parents learned to wait for their child and the parents' expectations of their child were more realistic and more positive. Parents' anxiety about their parenting and the child's future decreased as they experienced success effecting small but marked changes in their children.
