Family therapy treatment: Working with obese children and their families with small steps and realistic goals

Childhood obesity treatment can be discussed from several points of view, and there are many forms of treatment. Solution‐focused brief therapy (SFBT) and systemic family therapy can be useful in a wide range of contexts and settings such as social care, education and healthcare. They can also be used wherever practitioners sometimes feel that they have very little impact on the patient and where the patient seems to be resistant to acknowledging his/her problem. Health professionals need to assist by starting to explain main goals and medical information in terms of a single, small, concrete and important goal, described as the beginning of a new behaviour, not as the end of something. This report focuses on some useful tools and methods taken from casework examples from multidisciplinary obesity team meetings with more than 300 families during a 3‐y project approximately between 2002 and 2003 at the Childhood Obesity Unit at University Hospital, Malmö. Other casework examples are taken from supervision and training professionals who are currently working with or are going to work with childhood obesity using a solution‐focused model. The main aim of this report is to discuss and think about the difference between problem‐solving and solution‐building interview questions when it comes to treatment regarding how best to help children and parents with serious obesity health problems. Conclusion: There is a great need for treatment models and the prevention of childhood obesity now and in future, which presents an interesting and urgent challenge for open‐minded thinking and new fields of research.