The Yahel Center – Parent-Child Therapeutic Center

The Yahel Parent-Child Center is a multi-disciplinary therapeutic center in Jerusalem, which aims at increasing positive outcomes for high-risk families. The center help prevent child maltreatment and increase the parents’ capacity to protect, nurture, and promote their children’s healthy development. The center treats 5 to 12-year-old children and their parents from high-risk families, who suffer from emotional and/or behavioral disorders, as a result of parental disfunction and neglect. In response, the center brings together a multi-professional staff of social workers and expressive arts therapists to help parents overcome hardships and unhealthy behaviors, achieve child well-being and prevent out-of-home placement.  The center’s staff tailors individualized and client-centered treatment plans, in joint work with the Welfare Department’s case manager, in collaboration and through open communication with the family, in order to build trust and facilitate positive engagement. This allows our professionals to identify strengths and protective factors and reduce likelihood of out-of-home placement. Treatment plans include goals, objectives, detailed time plans, outputs, and future recommendations. They incorporate individual/couple/family/group therapies and if necessary, home interventions. Importantly, throughout its operation, the center also works with a wider system of professionals in the community and develops projects for family preservation as therapeutic groups for families in dire need of guidance, treatment and support. The therapeutic groups serve normative families from South Jerusalem who are dealing with the challenges of our time and especially due to the war of iron swords in Israel. The activity aims at providing them with solutions, tools, skills, and responses in a parenting themed framework; addressing the complexities and difficulties that arise in our time, specifically since the outbreak of the war.