Children in Distress: A Guide for Screening Children's Art

Rating:
Summary: Not recommended
Review: As a Board Registered Art Therapist and instructor, I made the error of recommending this book to students before I actually laid eyes on it. What a mistake! When one of my students, also a trained art therapist, received it, we literally laughed. This is such a poor example of literature on how to understand children's art. Even more disturbing were the strange pseudo-drawings of children's art made by the authors. Clearly not recommended when there are so many better books available.

Rating:
Summary: Not a realistic tool for screening child artwork
Review: As a graduate art therapy student who has been working with children for years, I found this book to have very few realistic examples of children's artwork. Many of the images were clearly created by an adult and therefore provided very little help as to what to look for in childrens art. In addition to the poor images, I didn't find much of the information to have therapeutic value.

Rating:
Summary: Not a realistic tool for screening child artwork
Review: Children in Distress was a totally enlightening book. The questions presented to be used with a drawing are absolutely great. I have read this book several times and continue to re-read it along with other books about art therapy. This book is the most helpful to me with my students.

Rating:
Summary: These are not new techniques
Review: Hey, it is erroneous to say that these are "new techniques," when in fact they are 50 to 60 years old. What the authors did was do a new study with these techniques and then try to offer a convincing book on analyzing children's drawings. The problem is, it is not very convincing. One cannot use the indicators the authors note to establish child abuse in a slick fashion. We already know that the techniques the authors based this study on are not reliable, so they really just built on what was already unreliable to begin with. I understand their need to help children in distress, but that was not really accomplished here.