Family Therapy & Systemic Practice

As workers in the field of child and family relationships we are now well versed in the fact and dynamics of child abuse and violence. However as both the professional world and the wider community have come to embrace the need to protect children and parent in positive ways, family violence has appeared in a new guise. This is the violence which occurs in families’ of children with acute behavioral problems and parents who are helpless in its grip. Such parents view themselves as less powerful than their children and respond to their child’s demands with escalating punishment and violence, impotent acquiescence or an oscillation between the two. Such escalations feed the parents’ sense of powerlessness, hopelessness and the belief that ‘nothing works’ and allows the child to make increasingly risky and self-destructive choices.

Enter Haim Omer who has taken the ideas of non-violent resistance as practiced by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King and applied them to families with children with aggressive or other acute behavioral problems. Originally developed in Israel, this parent focused approach is now being applied in centers in Germany, England, Switzerland and Holland. Yet however intuitively appealing an intervention may be it is only as good as its objective effectiveness. The paper by Weinblatt, U. and Omer, H. “Nonviolent Resistance: A Treatment for Parents of Children with Acute Behavioral Problems” addresses this question. This is an evaluative study of a five week parent training program in the approach which randomly assigned 73 parents into a treatment and wait list control group and took measures at pre-treatment, post-treatment and one month follow up. Parents who participated in the treatment ‘showed a decrease in parental helplessness and escalatory behaviors and an increase in perceived social support’ compared to the waitlist control group. Intervention also resulted in the parents reporting a decrease in the children’s negative behaviors. One month follow-up demonstrated maintenance of change in relation to parental helplessness, parental permissiveness and child behavior. While the authors are careful to recognize the limitations of a study which was of limited duration and based on parental self report, the results are encouraging enough to warrant further exploration and application of this creative and respectful approach to extremely difficult children for whom traditional behavioral modification approaches have proved ineffective.

Weinblatt, U and Omer, H (2008) “Nonviolent Resistance: A Treatment for Parents of Children with Acute Behavioral Problems” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 34,1, 75-92 The answer : Each produced remarkable outcomes in seemingly intractable circumstances using methods of non-violent resistance