Child traumatherapy: Its role in managing the effects of trauma,loss, damaged attachment,and dissociation in children exposed to lethal urban community violence

Violence and its effects on children should be a pressing concern for clinicians, policy makers, and public officials. Urban violence assaults the minds and bodies of our children, resulting in troublesome and complex responses that have far-reaching implications for the future of society. This article highlights chronic post-traumatic and loss response patterns associated with the horrors of violence and murder witnessed by a child, and a model of intervention referred to as child traumatherapy.Since the problems presented by many inner city children are wide-ranging, to include attachment problems and dissociation, a multisystems approach transformed in practice into an intersystem approach may be required in many cases. This approach begins with a unisystem, then moves to multisystems, and later to coordinated intersystem service structures. This may be realized through the coordinative skills of the therapist who instrumentally brokers clinical-community services, while ensuring political leveraging for the benefit of children. In essence, the model is a comprehensive one which directly engages the child self system, the family-extended family systems, the community, the political system, while employing ethnoculturally enlightened methods. The model integrates techniques in play, cognitive, behavioral, social, and psychodynamic therapies, and highlights the indispensability of the use of transference to manage terror, horror, and resolve disturbed attachment. These and other issues will be presented in this article.     

Nursing behavior of infant pigtail monkeys (Macaca nemestrina): preferences for nipples.

Nursing behavior of 56 singleton infant pigtail monkeys (Macaca nemestrina) was monitored. Infants over 1 mo. of age showed strong preferences for one of their mothers' nipples, while few infants less than 1 mo. old did so. The infants which had the lowest birthweights for each sex showed no clear preference even though they were older than 1 mo. A trend toward lateral preference (for the right nipple) was identical for male and female infants. Analysis of the development of preference for nipple may provide useful information of assessing development progress.     

Similarity of attitudes and constructs in children's friendships

Sex prejudice in children's friendships has frequently been noted. This study examined the role of similarity of attitudes and personal construct ratings in this effect. Subjects were two classes of school children, aged 7–8 and 9–10 years. There were 29 children in each class. Subjects completed an attitude scale, construct rating scale, and sociometric questionnaire. Similarity effects were primarily in the younger children. Boys were more similar to each other in attitudes than were girls, and girls were more similar to each other in construct ratings than were boys (p < .001); there was greater similarity of attitudes and construct ratings in friendship rather than nonfriendship comparison dyads (p < .01). The sociometric data, when compared with sociometric data collected 6 months earlier, showed that these results could not be due to sex differences in the stability of friendships but rather suggested age and sex differences in the informational bases of friendships in middle childhood.