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.

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.

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.

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.

Families need child care more in the 1990s than ever before. Those hours surrounding school time are particularly troublesome for working parents. In this new edition of a pioneering work, Seligson and Allenson explore the challenges that child care providers will encounter as the 21st century approaches. The authors skillfully balance a practical business operations text with an investigation into the meaning of social obligation. The central theme of partnership in offering care underscores each of the 12 chapters. These general planning elements form guidelines designing and managing a caring program for children aged 5-12.

Topics covered include administration, curriculum, legal issues, budgeting, and assessment. Careful consideration is given to an outline for human resources development. The authors take an in-depth look at the day-to-day operation of a center--detailing concerns from behavioral and medical to scheduling and transportation. The concept of a child care professionalism which reflects respect, partnership, and caring, is sustained throughout this practical manual. An important contribution to the research and practice of child care, this volume draws providers and practitioners together in a process of self-reflection in order to effectively respond to the needs of today's--and tomorroW's--families.

Successful after-school programs are just a part of this detailed study of the impact of unsupervised or latchkey children on the community in general and on libraries in particular. For school librarians who have found themselves in the new and undefined role of after-school supervisor, this book is the first to examine the phenomenon and share exciting and successful ideas you can use to meet the needs of latchkey children in your library. Latchkey Children is also a comprehensive reference source on facts and information, including valuable research findings appearing in print for the first time.

Drawing on the best professional research and thinking, Professor William Damon charts pragmatic, workable approaches to foster basic virtues such as honesty, responsibility, kindness, and fairness-methods that can make an invaluable difference throughout children's lives.

Children who are adopted have predictable and often unspoken concerns about themselves and how they joined their families. In this wise and timely guide, Lois Melina, author of the classic manual Raising Adopted Children, helps parents anticipate and respond to those concerns in ways that build self-esteem. Through sample conversations, reassuring advice, and age-specific activities parents will find answers to such questions as:

-- When should I give my child the letter her birthmother wrote?
-- How do I share information that might upset my child?
-- How can I know when my child is wondering about adoption?
-- What should I tell school personnel about my child's history? What about family and friends?
-- How can I be sure we talk about adoption enough, but not too much?

Whether parents adopted traditionally, as stepparents, or through donor insemination, surrogacy, or in vitro fertilization, Making Sense of Adoption will open the door to a lifetime of growth and understanding for adoptive families.

The second volume in a classic trilogy of works by Joseph Goldstein, former Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School; Albert J. Solnit, the former director of the Yale Child Study Center, and Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud. These texts (Beyond the Best Interests of the Child was the first in the series, and In the Best Interests of the Child was the third) are classic references often cited in child custody cases; Before the Best Interests of the Child specifically addresses when the state should intervene. Rather than the familiar legal "best interests of the child" doctrine, the authors's work is based on the more realistic standard of finding the "least detrimental alternative." This is indispensable reading for social workers, family court judges, lawyers, psychologists, and parents.

Based on a large-scale survey and in light of demographic and cultural factors, the author examines why children are sexually victimized, the sources of trauma, differences between reported and unreported cases of assault, possible increases in sexual victimization, and the experiences of abused chi