Working With Children in Groups: A Handbook for
Counsellors, Educators and Community Workers

Working With Children in Groups: A Handbook for
Counsellors, Educators and Community Workers

Working With Children in Groups: A Handbook for
Counsellors, Educators and Community Workers

As authors, we wonder whether readers might be interested in knowing something of our backgrounds and the reason why we undertook to write this book. We decided to write the book after we ran workshops to train people from the helping professions who were interested in running groups for children. Participants at our workshops became enthusiastic about the possible beneficial outcomes of running groups for children and encouraged us to incorporate ideas generated from the workshops into a book. Our own backgrounds have been helpful to us, when working with children in groups, in enabling us to make use of conceptual ideas and practice methods from the three professional disciplines of occupational therapy, counselling and psychology. Kathryn is an occupational therapist who has a Masters degree in counselling. David is a counselling psychologist with a strong interest in the experiential therapies such as Gestalt therapy. Kathryn spent many years as an occupational therapist working in psychiatric settings with children and young people (initially at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in the USA, then at the Mater Children's Hospital, Brisbane, and later at the Child and Youth Mental Health Service, in Maroochydore, Australia). While doing this work she was able to compare the relative effectiveness of working with children individually with that of working with children in groups. David, as a counselling psychologist, has had extensive experience in group work as a trainer in Gestalt therapy. He has specialised in working with children, young people and their families, and was for some years the coordinator of a family therapy unit at a crisis counselling centre, Lifeline, in Brisbane, Australia. Later, we both worked for an agency (the Talera Centre) that specialised in working with children and young people who had been exposed to violence in their families. During this time we became excited by the way in which groups for children and teenagers were powerful in helping these youngsters to change, feel better and learn more adaptive behaviours.

Geldard, Kathryn.