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Over the last decade, inspired by systemic family therapy and narrative approaches, Glenda and her teams in the UK have found ways to bring families, practitioners and communities together to respond to medical, mental health and social care crises. This work has taken place with children, adolescents, older people and people affected by intellectual disability and their families. This paper shares an inspiring story of this work and describes ways of 'conducting' and 'weaving' networks of hope.

This article explores how we might bring forth and value the voice of the person with intellectual disabilities alongside the voice of their family and carers so that all those present can feel understood and appreciated. We offer a description of systemic empathy as the ability to connect with one person while maintaining the possibility of connecting with other individuals in the system and at the same time tuning in to those people's connections with each other. We share examples from practice that challenge our ability to work empathically when there are several people in the same room holding different or opposing perspectives and who evoke different emotional reactions in us. We offer principles and practices through which we have been able to make empathy systemic with examples from our work with adults with intellectual disabilities and their families. These include empathizing through curiosity and irreverence, co-creating meanings with more than one person, double listening with ears, eyes and bodies, preparing our own emotional postures, taking the perspectives of others and creating reflecting processes.

This study explored whether certain child characteristics (age, type of problem presented, and gender) influenced the referral decisions of parents, general practitioners, and child psychologists. These three groups were taken as key gatekeepers in controlling access to mental health services. Results suggested that age of child and type of problem significantly affected the subject's responses whilst sex of child did not. Psychologically disturbed 10-year olds may be more likely to reach mental health services than psychologically disturbed 3-year olds, and children who showed their disturbance in terms of conduct disorder may be more likely to arouse concern than those who present with emotional disturbance.

Clients and professionals bring to their relationship with each other beliefs about the helping process which can significantly influence the outcome of referral and treatment. This article describes the development of the authors' ideas about this relationship to help and some of the beliefs that contribute to it. In clinical practice, issues around the relationship to help may need to be addressed at the referral, engagement or therapy phases.

The influences of social and family characteristics on individual differences in reading and spelling ability and IQ were investigated for 550 twin children aged 13 yrs. Measures of family social circumstances, parental background, the emotional atmosphere at home and the family's reading behaviour were used as predictor variables in multiple regression analyses with reading, spelling and IQ as dependent variables. There were consistent relationships between many of these measures and the dependent variables. The findings are compared to a previous biometrical genetic analysis of the same data set. It is concluded that the results are within the limits predicted by the genetic analysis. Most of the effect of these environmental influences on children are general, i.e. related to IQ, and not specifically related to reading. After controlling for the effects of IQ on reading, only family size and some aspects of parent-child relationships were significant predictors of reading ability

This study investigates whether 13-year-old retarded (SRR) and backward (RB) readers show differences in their use of two reading strategies: phonological and whole word. Thirty-eight SRR and 63 RB children were compared on their ability to read non-words (phonological strategy), irregular words (whole word strategy) and the relative facility with which they read regular compared to irregular words (regularity effect). In order to control for IQ and reading level two different two-group designs were employed: a ‘mental-age control’ design where only IQ was controlled and a ‘reading-age match’ design in which reading level and IQ were both taken into account. The findings suggest that in terms of single word reading, retarded and backward readers are not distinct groups, at least at 13 years of age. The overall level of reading proficiency explains most of the difference in reading between the two groups and they do not necessarily use different reading strategies. The implications of these findings for the controversy over subtypes of reading disability and the continuum of reading skill are discussed.

The reading skills of 285 pairs of 13-year-old twins drawn from the general population were studied. The twins were independently tested using standardized measures of intelligence, reading and spelling ability. The genetic contribution to reading ability was assessed by examination of correlations in monozygotk: (MZ) and student-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins, and by analysing differences bi Mccen MZ and DZ twins in concordance of reading disability rates. The results suggested that, at this age, genetic factors play only a moderate role in general reading backwardness or specific reading retardation. However, when spelling ability was investigated, a heritability of 0.53 was obtained, increasing to 0.75 when intelligence was controlled. Strong genetic influences on spelling were also found when concordance rates for spelling disability were compared for MZ and DZ pairs.