This book will illustrate how systemic theory, as both a meta-theory and a relational organic theory, can be a suitable framework for understanding and appreciating the new horizons of systemic practice with children and families in their various contexts. Even if our ambition is to present new horizons in systemic therapy, we also gratefully acknowledge the influences from earlier systemic authors, therapists and researchers whose contributions are made visible in the various chapters. In acknowledging the importance of the contribution to the systemic field of many earlier authors, we hope to show how we need a place on which we can stand and watch in order to see the (new) horizons.

The chapters in the present book are written at a time of profound changes and many challenges, such as, climate changes, wars and pandemic, creating uncertainty but also many possibilities. In all this, the complex nature of dynamic systems becomes very visible. Systemic thinking encourages, maybe even requires a plurality of theories, perspectives and approaches. Indeed, as Axberg and Petitt write in one of their chapters, referencing Luigi Onnis, the keyword in the paradigm of complexity is plurality. But also, a systemic perspective is a way of understanding our being in the world, from the big questions to the small choices we make together. For example, Myra illustrates in her chapter how even small therapeutic interventions can be of vital importance in complex situations.

The different chapters shed light on how systemic perspectives, as they are presented in their varying contexts, hopefully promote hope by giving room for reflections on uncertainty, change, opportunities, interconnections and differences. Furthermore, the chapters will foreshadow the ways that systemic theory makes space for a multiplicity of varying approaches that addresses the needs of children and those assisting them in their different settings, where children grow and develop in the context of their unique needs and challenges. Importantly we can see this systemic influence even in settings where other perspectives are prevailing.

So why do we need this book about new horizons for systemic practice with children and families? Because we wanted to explore newer applications of our understanding of the developments in systemic practice and to show how a growing integration of research with these new developments across the broader fields of psychotherapy and counselling can be held within a systemic relational umbrella. In this book, we focus on the lives of children and families, organizations and staff that work with children. For example, working systemically with children and families in a medical context, with diagnostic practices and the dilemmas of labelling children, systemic consultation practices in social, health and educational contexts, the impact of separation and divorce on child and family development, working with parents in inpatient treatment displaying substance use problems, working systemically with disability, working with manualized approaches to eating disorders and with the intergenerational impacts of service responses. The emphasis in this book will be on the social utility of these new approaches, their historical origins, and how practice can be enhanced as a result. All the editors and authors are leading some of the developments in their particular field of competence. Several of the authors are affiliated with VID Specialized University, Oslo, which provides one of the largest systemic training programs in Europe. All the authors are using examples from systemic practice across a range of health and social care contexts.

In the first chapter, Jim Sheehan addresses the challenges for systemic approaches attempting to assist children and young people to navigate the often conflict-filled terrain of their parents’ separation and divorce. He suggests that systemic interventions need to be fortified by a human rights perspective as practitioners aim to facilitate the continuation of childhood in the face of several forms of its interruption.

Next, Anne Grasaasen and Esben Esther Benestad Pirelli shed light over the understanding of gender as a phenomenon that is in major change. They reflect on how to create systemic conversations where children and youth, together with their families, in a safe context, can explore feelings and experiences about their gender identity.

In the following chapter, Siv Merete Myra addresses what kind of focus can be large enough in sessions with parents who have substance use problems. She shows how small interventions in complex situations can co-create a space that allows for the sharing of perspectives that can enable the parents to find a way forward together.

Anne Grasaasen describes in her chapter, meetings with families of children who have serious illnesses and where death has become the frame of family life. In encounters with parents dealing with anticipatory grief, therapists must also attempt to create alliances with scientific discourses. She illustrates the utility of systemic perspectives in a medical context by expanding causal explanations and providing descriptions of illness within a frame of relational values.

Thereafter, Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson and Gina Hægland wish to create some ideas about a new horizon in working within the framework of a manual. The Family-Based Treatment manual works as their example, but the points they underscore can be useful in any manualized context. They suggest a possible way to modify the manual without removing the efficient factors that have been the core of the positive results, by working with systemic formulation.

The chapters by Myra, Grasaasen, Torsteinsson and Hægland all describe the work in contexts where medical or psychiatric diagnoses are prominently in focus. Ulf Axberg and Bill Petitt address the question of whether systemic perspectives and psychiatric diagnoses are mutually exclusive or inclusive. Central to their systemic perspective is that systemic therapists also have a fundamental need to organize the domain of human suffering. It can bring order to clinical practice, research and professional communication, but crucially it will be in a parallel but different manner to the way in which it is important for medical practitioners.

The chapter from de Flon and Sheehan focuses on systemic work with families with children that have different and various kinds of difficulties that they have had since birth as a result of accidents and injuries. Illustrating systemic practice when the commonly underlaying assumption and expectation that problems in families and family living can and should be solved and forced to disappear is challenged.

The last two chapters of the book shed light on how systemic perspectives can be useful within the school context. In the chapter by Marc van Roosmalen, the Community Relations model (CoRe) is presented. It reconceptualizes a child mental health service, and how it can be operationalized. The CoRe model shifts from an individualized overwhelmingly deficit or illness model of mental health to a relational, resilience-based and integrated systems model that works systemically with partners and communities, with a focus on thriving communities and professional systems. Finally, in the chapter by Ulf Axberg and Bill Petitt the authors illustrate the idea that within a systemic framework it can be possible to encompass any idea that helps increase our understanding and effectiveness, even when it includes the combination of two separate intervention models, derived from very different philosophical and theoretical traditions.