Treating parents and children together: A feminist look at exclusionary practices in family therapy and in child psychotherapy

In this paper I look at two traditions of psychotherapy with children: family therapy (here considered in its common paradigm of systems theory and not in its diversity of approaches) and individual psychodynamically oriented child therapy The author examines how, in these two modalities of treatment, the real world of the parent-child relationship, which remains mostly a world of women and children, tends to be left out in practice. Many family therapists ''exclude'' children from their sessions and concentrate on the marital relationship while child therapists ''exclude'' parents from the core of the therapeutic process. The issues for therapists and the consequences for adults and children in families in this compartmentalization of services are examined within a feminist framework. The development which is advocated is for therapists to expose themselves fully to the world of the parent-child relationship as a first step in reexamining their stereotypical views of motherhood and father-hood which trap women in conflicted and potentially exploitative situations and do not consider that children actively construct their own relationships.