Saturday 15 May 2010 (10.00am-5.15pm, registration: 9.30-10.00am)
ASK THE EXPERTS: SURGERY DAY “Help! This child is driving me mad”
Theme of the day: Challenging Behaviour

Cost: £160 (includes a complimentary buffet lunch)

These exciting new surgery days offer you a unique opportunity to bring all your problems about particular challenging children and young people. Our experts (who have seen it all!) will listen to your questions and then help with exactly what to do, what to say and how to be with the most difficult behaviours and emotional storms. Why continue struggling on your own?

We have made sure that all our surgery days offer a sufficiently informal and safely structured setting, so that you will feel free enough to openly ask your questions and share your concerns (with the necessary confidentiality proviso in place of course). Alternatively, prior to the day you can send in short statements about the children/young people you are concerned about which will be addressed by the experts on the day.*

From similar past events, participants have told us that hearing the experts’ responses to other delegates has been as useful as responses to their own concerns. This is largely because of common and recurring themes and issues. As a result, participants go away feeling empowered with a whole new skill set coupled with the knowledge of underlying causes as to what fuels such challenging or troubled behaviour.

Key topics covered include:

• Interventions for working with: challenging, disturbing and anti-social behaviour in children and teenagers
• Children/teenagers who threaten authority
• Children/teenagers who lie and steal
• Children/teenagers who are cruel
• Children/teenagers who are impulsive
• Children/teenagers who react to minor stressors as major emergencies
• Children/teenagers diagnosed as having conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, ADHD, Asperger’s

Benefits from attending this conference

• Get that essential help with children/teenagers with whom you have been struggling
• Understand the dynamics of challenging behaviour and why conventional methods of response often fail
• Learn how to respond to troubled children/teenagers in the most stressful and challenging situations
• Learn therapeutic relational responses which calm both of you
• Learn to recognise the signs of post traumatic stress so as not to mistake this for out-of-control behaviour
• Learn simple, practical ways to avoid power struggles, defuse ‘in-your-face’ challenges, and engage oppositional children in rewarding ways

Speakers

Louise Bomber
Attachment Support Teacher and Therapist. Author of highly acclaimed book Inside I'm Hurting and chapter author for Teenagers & Attachment. Currently works for Brighton & Hove adoption team. Recently set up a private Attachment Support Service for schools in Brighton & Hove. Worked with individual pupils, classes, whole school settings, teachers and support staff across both the primary and secondary phases. Provided consultations and training for education, health and social services. Currently facilitating a voluntary arts project called ‘Walk A Mile In My Shoes' to raise the profile of inclusion for attachment disordered children and teenagers.

Dr Dan Hughes
International expert on the extreme end of challenging behaviour in children/teenagers. Clinical Psychologist. Author of many books including: Principles of Attachment-Focused Parenting and Building the Bonds of Attachment - Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children. Decades of ground-breaking and profoundly moving clinical practice with very challenging children and teenagers.

Dr Jeanne Magagna
Former Head of Psychotherapy Services at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Consultant child, adult and family psychotherapist in Ellern Mede Centre for Eating Disorders in London. Vice-president and joint coordinator of training for the Centro Studi Martha Harris Tavistock Model Child Psychotherapy Trainings in Florence, Venice, and Palermo, Italy. Consultant to Family Futures Consortium, an adoption and fostering treatment centre in London. Edited Universals of Psychoanalysis and jointly edited: Crises in Adolescence and Intimate Transformations: Babies with their Families.

Back to conference listings page