Studies in the Assessment of Parenting Edited by Peter Reder, Sylvia Duncan & Clare Lucey. Hove: Brunner-Routledge. 2003.320 pp. £17.95 (pb). ISBN I 583911804

Studies in the Assessment of Parenting aims to provide a practical guide to professionals who offer expert opinions to the courts in child care cases and to inform day-to-day work in child protection and in enhancing the care of children within their families. Most of the contributors are child and adolescent psychiatrists, but there are chapters by a psychologist, a forensic psychiatrist and a judge. The book is divided into four parts: ‘Principles and practice’, which offers a framework for assessment, including the problem of cultural matching between assessor and family; ‘The child's perspective’, in which attachment, significant dimensions of harm, the reliability of child witnesses and the views of children are addressed; ‘Assessing parents’, which focuses on specific parent groups, for example adolescents, violent individuals and parents with personality disorders; and ‘Recommendations’, which looks at parental denial, contact arrangements, foster care and adoption, and includes also a chapter in which an experienced judge outlines his role in weighing up a case and applying the law.

Much will be familiar territory for those working in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). However, this book will be of value to higher trainees in CAMHS and other professionals new to this area of work. As a general adult psychiatrist increasingly being called upon to offer expert opinion in relation to maternal mental health in child care cases, I found much of it to be helpful and it will be invaluable to adult psychiatry colleagues who find themselves being asked for an expert opinion. However, other than a very good chapter by Christopher Cordess on parents with personality disorder, there is very little detail on parents with mental illness, which is often reduced to the phrase ‘underlying psychopathology’. Concentrating on the legal system in England and Wales, the contributors only occasionally refer to equivalent legislation and almost never to alternative processes in other parts of the UK, which makes parts of this book less useful to professionals in those countries.