A history of the juvenile court movement in America, which focuses upon the central but neglected contribution of women reformers.

The establishment of juvenile courts in cities across the United States was one of the earliest social welfare reforms of the Progressive Era. The first juvenile court law was passed in Illinois in 1899. Within a decade twenty-two other states had passed similar laws, based on the Illinois example. Mothers of All Children examines this movement, focusing especially on the role of women reformers and the importance of gender consciousness in influencing the shape of reform. Until recently historians have assumed that male reformers dominated many of the Progressive Era social reforms. Mothers of All Children goes beyond simply writing women back into the history of the juvenile court movement to reveal the complexity of their involvement. Some women operated within nineteenth-century ideals of motherhood and domesticity while others, trained in the social sciences and living in the poor neighborhoods of America's cities, took a more pragmatic approach.

Despite these differences, Clapp finds a common maternalist approach that distinguished women reformers from their male counterparts. Women were more willing to use the state to deal with wayward children, whereas men were more commonly involved as supporters of women reformers' initiatives rather than being themselves the initiators of reform.

Firmly located in the context of recent scholarship on American women's history, Mothers of All Children has broad implications for American women's political history and the history of the welfare state.

Parenting is attracting more professional and political attention now than ever before. More and more parents need the support of others to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to choose what would be best for their children. A variety of professionals are often involved in contributing to the assessment of parenting and/or setting up programmes for enhancing it. This important guide provides practical information for setting up assessment and parenting programmes for a range of professionals, dealing with parenting issues in historical, socio-economic, gender and ethnic contexts. In this comprehensive book, a team of multi-disciplinary experts offers practical solutions to a variety of challenges faced by parents, and professionals devoted to helping the parents. The chapters explore parenting in relation to common, specific problems such as, hyperactivity in children, behaviour problems, learning difficulties, and stepfamily situations. Enhancing Parenting Skills is essential reading for a range of professionals, including health visitors, social workers, psychologists, probation officers, education welfare officers, teachers, general practitioners and paediatricians. It is also a useful text for students on professional courses such as Social Work, Family Therapy, and Family and Education.

With major changes in the age and character of children being adopted, the issues surrounding adoption have grown in complexity.  As increasing numbers of older children and children with histories of abuse, neglect and rejection are being placed for adoption, their developmental needs and the demands they make on parents and post-adoption services is considerable.

David Howe's authoritative book explores and explains current understandings of adopted children's social, behavioural and personality development.  It analyses the wide range of research and theoretical perspectives available on adoption and identities the major patterns and theories arising. The book introduces the reader to the full range of knowledge and understanding on the development of adopted children. Case examples and illustrations are used throughout to give an immediate and lively feel to the information presented.

Professionals must increasingly focus on the importance of family involvement in making decisions about the welfare of a child who is abused or needing care. Family Group Conferences has evolved as a positive means to encourage good links between these children and their families, and to help children within the family environment----instead of taking the children out of their homes. This book assists professionals to put the planning and theory of these conferences into practice. It examines the context, origins and development of the conferences, using the research and experiences of social services. It looks at the interaction between the primary carer and the professional and the role of these conferences in relation to specific problems and situations, such as domestic violence. The book offers views from families, social workers and other professionals on the practicalities of Family Group conferences, how they are managed in practice, and their outcomes. Finally, the book includes examples from real--life family conferences.

An overview of the key issues facing the Jamaican child of the nineties. Crawford-Brown confronts the problems of Jamaican children with a view to sensitizing professionals and the public to these problems. This work provides a basis for analysing some of these problems and seeks to examine their programmatic and policy implications, particularly in relation to the improvement of systems of social service delivery. Who Will Save Our Children? is appropriate for professionals working with children, particularly teachers, social workers and guidance counsellors, but it is also geared towards parents, to help them understand their own situations and responses in terms of Jamaican society.

Foreign adoption is an often tricky, sometimes treacherous venture that is steadily gaining in popularity. Myra Alperson realizes that families pursuing this avenue of adoption need all the help they can get-and she fits it all into this handy guide.

For more than seventy-five years, the Carson Valley School has served the needs of orphaned girls and other dependent children from Philadelphia and neighboring Pennsylvania counties. Its hundred-acre campus is remarkable for its rolling terrain, neo-medieval buildings, and design as a fantasy village.

A legacy of the progressive education movement of the early decades of the twentieth century, the school was formally opened in 1918 as the Carson College for Orphan Girls. Its first president, Elsa Ueland, was a former settlement house worker who was a student of John Dewey and Maria Montessori, and her life story is closely intertwined with that of the school she oversaw for nearly half a century.

The institution was originally endowed by the $5 million estate of Philadelphia trolley magnate Robert N. Carson, who had stipulated in his will that it could receive only white, parentless girls. Over the decades, Ueland and her successors were able to remove these restrictions, so that by the 1970s Carson Valley was admitting children regardless of race or gender, as well as neglected and dependent youths whose needs were every bit as pressing as those of orphans of earlier times.

David Contosta's history of Carson Valley shows that it has long been a model of progressive education. Its faculty is dedicated to serving the individual needs of each child, preparing students to enter the workplace, and breaking down artificial barriers between school and the outside world. Drawing on Ueland's personal papers to communicate both her hopes for the Progressive era and her achievements during the early years of the school, Contosta tells how teachers and housemothers forged a unique collaboration that joined home and school in ways that other progressive educators could only dream of. He also notes the architectural significance of its enchanting facilities, which have played an integral part in the institution's treatment program.

Philadelphia's Progressive Orphanage clearly shows not only how Carson Valley has been shaped by a multitude of social, cultural, and political forces, but also how many of the reforms of the Progressive era remain in place today. It establishes Carson's place in the history of education and child welfare and makes an important contribution to renewed debate about orphanages and dependent child care.

Is your child afraid?

There are many traumatic experiences that cause a child to become scared—from divorce to the death of a loved one, from natural disasters to abuse. Even a disturbing news event that a child only sees on television or hears about but does not experience, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the classroom massacre in Scotland, can make a child fearful or sad. No matter what causes the situation, childhood trauma is common and should be dealt with quickly and effectively.

Dr. Barbara Brooks, a psychologist who has successfully helped kids through all types of traumatic situations, provides you with the knowledge you need to put the child you love back on the path to a full and happy life. Kids don't always know how to react to feelings of distress. If these scared feelings are not expressed in a positive way, they can surface later in life when dealing with them becomes more difficult.

Here are detailed instructions, based on professional techniques, to encourage kids of any age—from toddler to teenager—to reveal their feelings through words, drawings, and role playing with step-by-step advice for reassuring them and helping them let go of their fear.

During the 1980s, the issue of child support emerged on the national agenda. Federal and state governments in the United States focused on the private obligations of parents to support their children, strengthening existing child support laws and establishing new ones. In this book, Andrea H. Beller and John W. Graham discuss what went right and what went wrong with child support payments during this period, investigating the socioeconomic and legal factors that determined child support awards and receipts, documenting why few gains were made in child support overall during the 1980s, and offering policy recommendations for the future. Analyzing Census Bureau data on child support awards and receipts beginning in 1979, Beller and Graham find that there were some minor improvements in the system and that these were due to changes in the legal and social environment surrounding child support. However, say the authors, many problems persist: the real value of child support awards and receipts has declined sharply, and black and never-married mothers, despite making some gains, continue to fare worse in the process than do non-black and previously married mothers. The authors evaluate the effectiveness of new federally mandated child support enforcement techniques and guidelines by focusing on how such laws worked in states that had them prior to the federal mandate. They also look for the first time at the indirect consequences of child support, showing how it affects mothers' decisions about work, welfare, and remarriage and their children's decisions about continuing their education.

Focusing on good working practice in all aspects of conducting enquiries into alleged child abuse, this book takes a positive approach to improving relationships between the workers and the families involved. Each chapter concentrates on a specific issue, including topics such as gatekeeping, planning an enquiry, interviewing children, medical examinations, and recorded agreements. Practice, research, and procedures are examined critically, from a perspective which emphasises the importance of partnership with children and families. This book is essential reading for social services practitioners and managers, voluntary organisations and all concerned with the current debate about the role of enquiries into alleged child abuse and neglect. This book forms part of a re-examination of enquiries into alleged child abuse managed jointly by the National Institute for Social Work, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Parents Against INjustice.

Today nearly half of all people in the Middle East are under the age of fifteen. Yet little is known about the new generation of boys and girls who are growing up in a world vastly different from that of their parents, a generation who will be the leaders of tomorrow. This groundbreaking anthology is an attempt to look at the current situation of children by presenting materials by both Middle Eastern and Western scholars. Many of the works have been translated from Arabic, Persian, and French.

The forty-one pieces are organized into sections on the history of childhood, growing up, health, work, education, politics and war, and play and the arts. They are presented in many forms: essays in history and social science, poems, proverbs, lullabies, games, and short stories. Countries represented are Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel/West Bank, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

This book complements Elizabeth Fernea's earlier works, Women and the Family in the Middle East and Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak (coedited with Basima Bezirgan). Like them, it will be important reading for everyone interested in the Middle East and in women's and children's issues.

Filled with fascinating insights into the collective emotional life of inner-city kids, this book is also a highly original history of the erosion of urban community life since World War II.

Combining historical and legal scholarship, this is an analysis of the history of child custody in the USA from colonial times to the present day. It draws on history to illuminate contemporary issues, offering a rich perspective on the historical relationship of children to their parents. The author draws on three periods of pivotal change in social attitudes and the law, connecting these transformations to the changing status of women and the increasing power of mothers. He describes how the present move away from maternal preference toward equal custodial rights has been promoted by feminists' struggle for equal political rights and a new theory of equal parenting adopted by social scientists. Includes a new preface by the author.

In recent years considerable attention has been paid to the subject of abuse in childhood. Less attention has been paid to what happens to the vast number of women and men who have reached adulthood with this experience haunting them. Moira Walker overviews the experience and its implications, dealing with physical, sexual and psychological abuse. An essential part of the content is based on interviews with survivors of child abuse, voicing their views on the effects of the experience and the effectiveness of the help offered. At the same time Surviving Secrets seeks to understand the context in which abuse takes place, the society which itself contains and sustains abuse at various levels. It is a moving account of the experience and effects of childhood abuse and a handbook for those in the caring professions, in voluntary organizations and elsewhere who are helping survivors of abuse.

"Mommy, why can`t the doctors make you better?"..."You won`t be there, will you? Who`ll take care of me?"-Rachel, age 5 AIDS breaks the rules of dying. It strikes the young rather than the old, decimating families and devastating communities. It will leave as its legacy a generation of orphans-traumatized by multiple losses, isolation, stigma, and grief. By the turn of the century, more than a hundred thousand children and youth in the United States-and ten million worldwide-will lose their parents to AIDS.Written by professionals in medicine, law, social work, anthropology, psychiatry, and public policy, this volume is the first full-length look at the issues facing children whose parents and siblings are dying of AIDS: what children experience, how it affects them, how we can meet their emotional needs and help them find second families, how we counter the stigmas they face. Authors explore ways to promote resilience in these AIDS-affected children. Stories of the children and their caretakers, told in their own words, are woven throughout.Pioneering and practical, the book presents an action agenda and resource directory for our nation`s policymakers as well as for parents and those who work with children in both formal and informal settings. This book is produced in conjunction with a video, Mommy, Who`ll Take Care of Me? Forgotten Children of the AIDS Epidemic, which will be shown on PBS and is also available from Yale University Press.

Every day we experience shocks to our civic sensibility. In our view, these shocks are due to the marketization of our social endowment, of family life, of childhood, health, and knowledge, of security and employment. The raw side of the trend towards the marketization and defamilization of the social bond is what we see in street crime, drugs, school drop-outs, single-family poverty, homelessness, and unemployment, which we experience either directly or vicariously through media reportage whose power to observe is equalled only by its inability to explain. Indeed, the media coverage of the daily degradation of the life-world is itself an essential ingredient in the reduction of social concern to social anxiety that further undermines civility.

This compendium provides an orientation to basic issues of child and family policy. It includes an overview of the recent history of child and family policy in the United States; an exploration of several political economic conditions underlying changes in these policies; a historical survey of policies toward dependent children; and case studies of selected local, state, and federal policies. The case study approach helps to discern patterns in successful and unsuccessful policies, clarify assumptions and values that underlie them, and develop evaluation criteria. Policy formation is the focus in analyses of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act; family support initiatives in Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland; and municipal policies for homeless families in Atlanta, Denver, and Seattle. Examinations of the federal Baby Doe regulations and AIDS education policy in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools highlight policy implementation. An account of the Massachusetts Day Care Partnership Project concentrates on the third phase of policy analysis: policy evaluation. The concluding chapters stress the importance of considering race, class, and gender in defining social problems, setting policy agendas, and structuring and evaluating policies and programs. They then provide an analytic framework for assessing future responsibilities for U.S. child and family policy.

Child Care Options presents the facts, the background information, and the special considerations involved in discussing and selecting on-site or near-site child care, as well as programs designed to deal with difficult child-care situations. As authorities in work/family relations, the authors share the firsthand knowledge and experience they have gained as consultants to such diverse groups as the "Washington Post, " American Labs, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

When are children old enough to understand medical information? When are they mature enough to make wise decisions in their best interests? This book explores these questions through detailed qualitative research. It is based on in-depth interviews with children undergoing surgery, their parents and many of the staff caring for them in four city hospitals. In their own words, the child patients challenge many of the accepted ideas about their rights, interests and abilities.

Deciding how best to help an abused or neglected child can be an agonizing process for protective service workers. Should caseworkers recommend that the child be removed from the home temporarily and placed in foster care? Should the child be allowed to remain at home with support services to bolster the parents' ability to provide a safe and nurturing environment? Should the child be separated permanently from parents and be eligible for adoption? This book provides practical guidelines for workers who must make decisions about these and other issues. The authors, a psychoanalyst, a social worker, and a research scientist, discuss thirty-five cases of child abuse and neglect that have come to the attention of the courts and caseworkers in Connecticut but that are typical of cases throughout the United States. The children represent a range of ages and ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The cases illustrate a variety of placement issues including sexual abuse, abandonment, adoption, and visitation conflicts. In each case, the authors attempt to demonstrate that the least harmful decision-making is based on sound principles of child development: the child's need for continuity of affectionate relationships and his or her need to feel wanted by at least one responsible adult. The book, illustrating useful ways of resolving child-placement conflicts, will be an essential guide and resource for all who work in this complex field.

Das Buch zeigt die zentralen gegenwartigen Herausforderungen der sozialpadagogischen Praxis, Wissenschaft und Fachpolitik auf. Basierend auf der Kritik unterschiedlicher Lesarten von Teilhabe und Wirksamkeit in den Jugendhilfedebatten zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts werden Professionalisierungsperspektiven skizziert, die Wirkungsforschung, Organisationsgestaltung und die wohlfahrtsstaatliche Begrundung der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe konsequent auf die Erweiterung der selbst bestimmten Verwirklichungsmoeglichkeiten von jungen Menschen ausrichten.

This volume is the result of the clinical, administrative, and advocacy experience that Dr. Plenk gained during the growth and development of The Children's Center in Salt Lake City. Using the day-treatment group therapy model, young children with emotional problems have been helped to eliminate difficulties that affect their education at a very early age. As a community agency built on a shoestring budget, the state, federal and local levels have contributed to major improvements in the learning and family life of many individuals associated with The Children's Center. This is their story written by the founder and executive director, now retired.

Who is responsible for juvenile delinquency? Mark D. Jacobs uses ethnographic, statistical, and literary methods to uncover the many levels of disorganization in American juvenile justice. By analyzing the continuities betwen normal casework and exceptional cases, he reveals that probation officers must commonly contrive informal measures to circumvent a system which routinely obstructs the delivery of services to their clients. Jacobs defines the concept of the "no-fault society" to describe the larger context of societal disorder and interpersonal manipulation that the juvenile justice system at once reflects and exacerbates.

This text explores the ethnography of truancy in its educational, political, legal, economic and ideological contexts. It attempts to discover how absences may be construed; what absentees from school actually do; and who is responsible for them.