Working with Teenage Parents: Handbook of Theory and Practice

Includes DVD of Observation clips.

For practitioners working with pregnant teenagers, young parents and their children.

Parenting, like adolescence, is a profoundly disturbing experience, demanding new competencies whilst stirring up urgent conflicts and unresolved issues. When adolescence and parenthood coincide, the pressure can be overwhelming. Not surprisingly, teenage mothers have a threefold rate of postnatal distress.

However, this dual emotional upheaval also offers mothers and fathers a "second chance" - to renegotiate painful anxieties and deprivations of their own childhoods, thereby cultivating a capacity for reflectiveness and more empathy for the child in their care. This internal transformation is enabled by caring practitioners who understand that in order to foster developmental processes in the baby or toddler, the young parent's own developmental needs must be met too.

This Handbook can be read for self-study, or for group work. It consists of three parts:

* A Theoretical Textbook: including individual and interactive activities

* A Training Pack: with a DVD of clips for observation, expanded notes, readings, appendices, handouts, feedback forms and a glossary of concepts.

* A Manual: to enable the training to be run by a local in-house leader for an interdisciplinary group of practitioners working in this field.