Eliciting children's thinking in families and family therapy

In this article, I introduce a way of talking between a therapist and children, which aims to be more adaptive to the family therapy context than the modes of communication with children often reported by individual psychotherapists. Although the recent increase in articles concerned with the role of children in family therapy is welcomed, I suggest that the common recommendation of the use of "play" and nonverbal methods of communication with young children can at times introduce its own constraints on a child's thinking. A method of engagement in "dialectical" conversations with children is described, and illustrated with verbatim case examples. It is argued that this offers one route to a discourse commonly used between children, and one that acknowledges their capacity to think.