Title: REBT Assessment and Treatment with Children
Abstract: Psychology has gone cognitive, and cognitive-behavior therapy has become the Zeitgeist in psychotherapy. Since the early 1980s, the cognitive orientation so popular with adults has filtered down to interventions with children (see Kendall, 2000). Today, many practitioners working with children use not only behavioral or family-systems conceptualizations to plan treatment but incorporate cognitive change as well. Cognitions have become viewed by many as the mediational variables by which these external factors (family systems and behavioral contingencies) have their effect. One can change children’s behavior by restructuring systems or by rearranging contingencies or, more directly and, perhaps more efficiently, by attempting to change the child’s cognitions directly. As with adults, rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) hypothesizes that children’s disturbed emotions are largely generated by their beliefs (Ellis, 1994). Irrational beliefs and distortions of reality are likely to create anger, anxiety, and depression in children just as they do with adults. In fact, because children are children—immature, less sophisticated, and less educated—one might expect them to make more cognitive errors than adults and to become upset more easily. There has been considerable research on the role of cognitions and irrational beliefs in particular in contributing to emotions not only in adults but in children (e.g., Bernard and Cronan, 1999). Over the past 30 years, a variety of REBT-oriented publications have enabled cognitive behavior therapists and other child-oriented practitioners (school counselors, school psychologists, social workers) to integrate childfriendly REBT methods in their work with children. Chief amongst these publications has been Bill Knaus’ (1974) book Rational Emotive Education: A Manual for Elementary School Teachers who for the first time, “translated” rational and irrational beliefs and disputing techniques into language and practices that could be understand and utilized by children as young as six. Child practitioners who discovered this resource found that their young
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-05-11
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 19
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