A vital interrogation of the internationally accepted policy and practice consensus that intervention to shape parenting in the early years is the way to prevent disadvantage. Given the divisive assumptions and essentialist ideas behind early years intervention, in whose interests does it really serve? This book critically assesses assertions that the 'wrong type of parenting' has biological and cultural effects, stunting babies' brain development and leading to a life of poverty and under-achievement. It shows how early intervention policies underpinned by interpretations of brain science perpetuate gendered, classed and raced inequalities. The exploration of future directions will be welcomed by those looking for a positive, collectivist vision of the future that addresses the real underlying issues in the creation of disadvantage.

Here is a comprehensive review of adolescent substance abuse issues and an expansive, empirically based curriculum for school-based programs to teach adolescents about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. The abuse of alcohol and other drugs among young people is a problem of alarming scope and gravity. Adolescent Substance Abuse explores the multiple forces which impact adolescents and can push them toward drug and alcohol abuse.Adolescent Substance Abuse proposes means by which to effect macro-level change in societal norms and values regarding substance abuse. The authors describes in detail an effective means of teaching adolescents about drugs and alcohol using an empirically based teaching method called Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT). TGT was developed through extensive research on games used as teaching devices. It uses small groups as classroom work units and capitalizes on peer influence by using peers as teachers and supporters. The book explains an effective curriculum which utilizes the TGT approach and provides a program for parents. The curriculum is unique in that it is anchored in empirical data and delivered via adolescent peer groups. Adolescent Substance Abuse addresses other issues pertinent to the reduction of adolescent substance abuse by exploring subsystems of change, including school and peer group environments, home and family, the media, community movements, and business and industry. The book is a great source of innovative ideas for beginning and expert counselors, social workers, mental health professionals, school psychologists, and others who want to prevent adolescent abuse of drugs and alcohol.

This book addresses the factors that explain the child welfare service careers of children, and the goals of permanency planning to be met for children entering foster care after initial abuse. It focuses on common child placements along the child welfare path.

Stepfamilies represent an increasing number of American households and shape the upbringing of countless stepchildren. Despite their prominence in society, our knowledge about these families is very limited. To address this deficit, the editors have drawn together the work of 16 nationally known scholars to deal with four questions:
* Marriages that create stepfamilies: Why do they occur? Fail? Succeed?
* How do stepfamilies function as child rearing environments?
* How do stepfamilies function as sources of support in later life?
* Building research and policy agendas: What is needed?
In seeking answers to these questions, the book bridges the disciplines of psychology, sociology, social psychology, child development, demography, law and policy. Readers will gain an understanding of the current knowledge about stepfamilies, obtain an appreciation of the diverse views on a variety of stepfamily issues, learn about existing and anticipated laws and policies that affect stepfamilies, and acquire ideas on needed research and policy agendas. Chapter authors are leading figures in psychology, sociology, demography, human development, and family law; their contributions are valuable to researchers, teachers, and students as well as policymakers and legislatures.

Here is an informative guide to help directors and staff of residential treatment centers (RTCs) cope with the financial and administrative problems resulting from today's financially turbulent times. Financial problems have closed some centers and managed care or other health care changes will soon reach others. Managing the Residential Treatment Center in Troubled Times deals directly with current difficult financial and management problems in RTCs and presents practical advice, discussions of current problems, and possible solutions. Authors explore a wide range of topics from dealing with community hostility to planning for the future. Specifically, chapters discuss: the application of total quality management to RTCs reasons and rationale for the decline of residential establishments in England how changes in an RTC affect the youngsters who live there privatization and purchase of service contracting profit vs. nonprofit organizations one agency's experience in establishing an RTC in a resistant neighborhoodManaging the Residential Treatment Center in Troubled Times offers fresh perspectives and alternatives for professionals involved with RTCs, including directors, government regulators, social and child care workers, and psychiatrists and psychologists.

Children need more than just good schooling: they require safe lives, good health, and sufficient resources to live and grow successfully in their community. This book makes this vital connection, as society must promote a quality education, available health services, and financial equity and opportunity for all.

Child Welfare 1872-1989 is the first comprehensive book on the history of social policy and child welfare from the 1870s to the present. It offers a full narrative of the development of social services for children, covering a range of topics including infant life protection and welfare, sexuality, child guidance, medical treatment, war time evacuation, and child poverty. Equally importantly the book studies the attitudes to policy-makers towards children. It reveals the way in which children have been viewed both as victims of and threats to the society in which they lived.

Some children seem to present parents, teachers, social workers and courts with such serious or disparate problems that holding them in secure accommodation is apparently the only way to control them. How this comes about, and by what criteria social workers and courts help them make these difficult decisions, are the subjects of this intriguing and innovative book. In "Secure Accommodation in Child Care", Harris and Timms use a major empirical study of children in secure accommodation as a basis for an analysis of relations between the state, the family and the "difficult" child. By synthesizing literary and social science theories, they examine court procedures and the experiences of social workers and the children themselves to explain how professionals and children make sense of their respective worlds, and how that "sense" is translated into personal or professional action. The functions of secure accommodation, although legally ascribed, are fundamentally ambigous; to "lock-up" children by means of an authorized strategy which embraces both the "sick" and the "wicked" suggests the existence of a less than obvious relation between meeting "needs", and furthering "interests".

This work focuses on the highly controversial Project 100,000 which was initiated in the midst of the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration. With the project as a model, the authors easily show exactly how the military examined, selected, classified, trained, and utilized the one third of our nation generally considered untrainable and unemployable. In addition to providing detailed statistics on the performance of lower aptitude youth in the military for the last half-century, this work analyzes experiments conducted by the armed forces to develop effective and efficient ways to train these youths.

This book deals with four types of abuse: neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. For each type of abuse, selected works of fiction, literary, and professional perspectives are juxtaposed along with applications for utilizing the stories in a hypothetical therapy setting. In addition, reports of mental health workers, organizations, agencies, statistics, cases studies, and important research findings regarding each type of abuse are summarized. Web links are provided as well as information on finding the professional print resources cited. Suggestions for additional fiction suitable for bibliotherapy are provided. This is an invaluable resource for teachers, parents, and any adults interested in helping teens battling with the damage of abuse.

This book considers the responses of states to migrant girls who are separated from family and enter state care systems as unaccompanied or trafficked young people. The book draws on research with girls and social work practitioners in the UK to explore what can happen when separated girls encounter professionals at borders and within care systems. It considers how separated girls adapt to different ideas of what it means to be a girl in destination countries, and how this is affected by their other intersecting identities. The book identifies how girls can feel welcomed, but also how young migrants can be seen in excluding ways. It argues that narratives of the fragile 'refugee child' are unhelpful ways to understand individual girls. Using theories and clear language relevant to both academics and practitioners, the author fills a gap in the research on migrant and trafficked young women who frequently represent the minority in care systems globally.

Find remarkable prevention and treatment strategies for preschool-age children of substance abusers in this informative volume. It provides an overview of the various problems exposure to substance abuse can cause for preschool children. Because of the strong influences parents have on their children, early childhood is a critical time for intervention to counteract the damaging effects of alcohol and drug abusing parents. Research shows that attitudes about alcohol and other drugs are already formed by junior high school level, and senior high school is too late for significant attitude change. Preschoolers and Substance Abuse promotes preschool age as the ideal time to apply strategies that will aid the family in building the self-esteem, trust, autonomy, and initiative necessary to protect the child from further problems caused by addictive parents. Intervention strategies are presented in a succinct manner, making them easy for practitioners, health officials, government officials, and family members to put into immediate practice.This book offers a unique approach to substance abuse, treating it as a community and societal problem rather than an individual problem. Intervention and treatment strategies are geared toward the substance abuse problem itself as well as how it impacts children and family systems. The harmful impact of alcohol or drug abusive parents is evaluated for all stages of childhood development, from pre-natal influences through infancy and the preschool years. Some of the harmful results of alcohol and drug abuse affecting preschool children addressed in this volume include violence, sexual abuse, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and intra-uterine exposure to drugs. The authors outline a comprehensive list of imperatives for a future agenda to protect preschool children from suffering the consequences of their parents'substance abuse. Public health officials, decision makers, practitioners, and legislators will find a series of policy recommendations including increased research, substance abuse training for child care workers, increased outreach and education for expectant mothers, and community-based outreach programs to insure ethnic or socioeconomic sensitivity and appropriateness.

Find remarkable prevention and treatment strategies for preschool-age children of substance abusers in this informative volume. It provides an overview of the various problems exposure to substance abuse can cause for preschool children. Because of the strong influences parents have on their children, early childhood is a critical time for intervention to counteract the damaging effects of alcohol and drug abusing parents. Research shows that attitudes about alcohol and other drugs are already formed by junior high school level, and senior high school is too late for significant attitude change. Preschoolers and Substance Abuse promotes preschool age as the ideal time to apply strategies that will aid the family in building the self-esteem, trust, autonomy, and initiative necessary to protect the child from further problems caused by addictive parents. Intervention strategies are presented in a succinct manner, making them easy for practitioners, health officials, government officials, and family members to put into immediate practice.This book offers a unique approach to substance abuse, treating it as a community and societal problem rather than an individual problem. Intervention and treatment strategies are geared toward the substance abuse problem itself as well as how it impacts children and family systems. The harmful impact of alcohol or drug abusive parents is evaluated for all stages of childhood development, from pre-natal influences through infancy and the preschool years. Some of the harmful results of alcohol and drug abuse affecting preschool children addressed in this volume include violence, sexual abuse, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and intra-uterine exposure to drugs. The authors outline a comprehensive list of imperatives for a future agenda to protect preschool children from suffering the consequences of their parents'substance abuse. Public health officials, decision makers, practitioners, and legislators will find a series of policy recommendations including increased research, substance abuse training for child care workers, increased outreach and education for expectant mothers, and community-based outreach programs to insure ethnic or socioeconomic sensitivity and appropriateness.

Here is a major new volume for practitioners, researchers, and those concerned with future policies to promote the welfare of children and families. The patterns of support and the ability of family members to care for each other have changed along with the problems for the health and functioning of families. In Families as Nurturing Systems, respected scholars examine the new and emerging directions in the design and implementation of family resources and support programs. They describe and analyze a wide range of program models in the areas of prevention, social support, family resource, and empowerment that have been implemented in schools, the Afro-American church, early intervention programs, the workplace, and the public policy arena, reflecting the needs of families at different stages in the family life cycle.

This book explores what it means to be and become-at-home in theological perspective, located in the context of a youth club. Drawing on ethnographic research, Phoebe Hill presents an account of what an authentic Christian hospitality could look like in a youth setting, and the ways in which the young people - the strangers at the door - might enable the Christian youth worker to become more fully at home. Discourses around Christian hospitality often unwittingly perpetuate implicit power imbalances. The youth club offers a context for Christian hospitality that 'tips' the power in favour of the young people who attend, enabling the youth leaders to share and create home with young people in a distinctive way. As young people leave the Church in droves, the Church faces the urgent and daunting task of finding new ways of being with young people on their own terms; this book offers one solution. Hill argues that homecoming is an essential task of humanity. We are connected in this common pilgrimage and the need to find places and spaces where we can be at home. Becoming at home may be harder than ever before; numerous sociological, philosophical and theological factors are compromising our ability to dwell in the contemporary world.

Childcare is one of the most debated issues today. This volume provides a comprehensive and current review of childcare research and public policy issues. Chapters are contributed by leaders from such fields as developmental research and early childhood education as well as by public policy officials. All major discussions and debates are summarized to promote a complete overview and speak to key issues of the day including affordability, availability, and staffing.

Experts representing practitioners, researchers, advocates, and triad members, explore the similarities and differences between adoptees placed as infants and as older children. The book promotes better integration of theory, practice, policy, and research in working with clients who are members of the adoption triad: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families. For the first time, the separate practice areas are bridged, pointing out the significant overlap between the two populations and the similar interventions that can be used when working with adoptees regardless of their age at placement.

Developed as a resource text for practitioners, researchers, students, and adoptive triad members, the first chapter provides an overview of the clinical and practice issues. Next the work presents issues surrounding infertility, and explores identity development with a following chapter on search and reunion issues. The fifth chapter discusses adoption support, both historically and with current developments and issues. The work then examines ethics and offers a model for ethical adoption practice. The final chapter explores treatment issues from a family systems perspective.

How does one investigate a child maltreatment case when the victim is blind, mute, deaf, mentally retarded, or confined to an institution? Special Children, Special Risks presents analysis, recommendations, and related research from social work, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and education essential for establishing and maintaining safe environments for handicapped children.

This book brings together a diverse group of experts to pool their knowledge and share their concerns about the risks of abuse faced by handicapped children. The contributors' perspectives come from the fields of medicine, social work, developmental psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, education, child welfare, law, public policy, and journalism.

of older children, adults, and the family unit as a whole. These moral evaluations are, in turn, influenced by such external contingencies as popula tion demography, social and economic factors, subsistence strategies, house hold composition, and by cultural ideas concerning the nature of infancy and childhood, definitions of personhood, and beliefs about the soul and its immortality. MOTHER LOVE AND CHILD DEATH Of all the many factors that endanger the lives of young children, by far the most difficult to examine with any degree of dispassionate objectivity is the quality of parenting. Historians and social scientists, no less than the public at large, are influenced by old cultural myths about childhood inno cence and mother love as well as their opposites. The terrible power and significance attributed to maternal behavior (in particular) is a commonsense perception based on the observation that the human infant (specialized as it is for prematurity and prolonged dependency) simply cannot survive for very long without considerable maternal love and care. The infant's life depends, to a very great extent, on the good will of others, but most especially, of course, that of the mother. Consequently, it has been the fate of mothers throughout history to appear in strange and distorted forms. They may appear as larger than life or as invisible; as all-powerful and destructive; or as helpless and angelic. Myths of the maternal instinct compete, historically, witli -myths of a universal infanticidal impulse."

This volume explores how children's rights has influenced research with children and how research can in turn shape policies and practices to enhance children's rights. The book examines the impact children's rights and Childhood Studies has had on how children are constructed and regulated internationally.

Research on mental health services for children and adolescents has become a vibrant subspecialty within the larger field of mental health services research. This research program experienced a somewhat later start than that focusing on adults, and faces a set of issues and challenges that are both different and in many ways more complex.
The served population itself is bounded by infancy and the late teen years, and includes all age groups in between. This developmental spectrum naturally necessitates there being a correspondingly diverse array of mental health services. The disorders experienced by children and adolescents can become apparent in the family, the school, the pediatrician??'s office, the social welfare agency or the courts, and the settings in which services may be provided can include any or all of these, as well as numerous others. Indeed, it has become standard practice in discussing mental health service delivery for this population to emphasize ???systems of care, ??? although identifying the outlines and boundaries of such systems can itself be a daunting task.
The chapters in this volume singly and collectively reflect the richness and complexity of research in this burgeoning and vitally important area and also highlight the novel conceptual and methodological approaches researchers in this field are taking in tackling its most critical issues.
*Focuses on the unique challenges related to mental health services for children
*Examines the different settings (school, home, community, etc.) where treatment and diagnosis may take place
*Reviews literature in the area and discusses the creative approaches taken by researchers

The number of homeless families in the United States continues to increase at an alarming rate. There is little doubt that becoming homeless and living in shelters has had significant effects on the lives of the children in these families. While many empirical studies have documented the effects of homelessness on one or another aspect of children's lives, "Moving To Nowhere" looks at the experience of losing one's home and living in a shelter from the perspective of the child. Children who are homeless tell their own story. They speak of life in a shelter as they have known it. It is through these stories that human service professionals can come to see homelessness as the children themselves see it and can learn what living in a shelter is like.

Children who are homeless tell their own story. They describe how they became homeless, why they think it happened to their family, what their expectations and concerns were as they realized they would be moving to a shelter, and what the shelter was like when they arrived. They speak often of missing their old neighborhoods, their friends, and their extended family. They report their fears, their worries about their family's future, the absence of money and resources, and, for some, the presence of violence or substance abuse in their families. They repeatedly tell of their embarrassment about being homeless; this profoundly colors their relationships to friends, schoolmates, and teachers. And, in each of their stories, these children provide clear and moving examples of how they manage to survive on a day to day basis while they wait for permanent housing. Health care professionals, psychologists, and teachers, as well as students and the general public, will find this work poignant and instructive.

Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth emphasizes the step-by-step procedures readers will need to implement evidence-based, innovative techniques and skills that emphasize well-being and resilience in youth. The strategies are specifically chosen to capture and hold the interest of youth who are often reticent to counseling. Furthermore, the skills-based approach of the book aims to demystify what one actually does in session with youth by moving away from the vagueness of talk therapy when youth have nothing to say, and toward sessions that engage youth in action, stimulating communication and change. Innovative Skills to Support Well-Being and Resiliency in Youth also advocates for practice interventions that empower youth to be in charge of their personal well-being and the healing process. By doing so, youth can take an active role in their own healthy functioning, as opposed to passively receiving treatment.

Social problems, such as childhood lead poisoning, do not occur in a vacuum. As such, defining such problems requires a holistic examination of the broad social, political, and economic influences that create and perpetuate the issue of concern. Richardson does this with eloquence and heart. She also investigates the attitudes various groups have held toward the Residential Lead-based Paint Hazard Reduction Act (Title X). In doing so, she reveals much about the attitudes officials hold toward problems that primarily affect poor communities, and demonstrates how these attitudes directly affect policymaking and policy enforcement. The social consequences of lead poisoning analyzed in this volume fall into the following categories:

• Housing
• Health
• Education
  Policy-making
• and
• Legal Challenges
• . The Cost of Being Poor would be useful to individuals in the fields of public health, policy, education, and law. Furthermore, this work would be of special use to educators, who would benefit from familiarity with lead poisoning as a factor in their students' lives and from becoming aware that there are options that poisoned children have to improve their situation. The first step necessary in eliminating social problems is to understand the nature of the problem. This study is a step in that direction.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make the United States more equal, reversing four decades of rising disparities between the very rich and everyone else. Millions of people of modest means will gain new benefits and protections from insurance company abuses - and the tab will be paid by privileged corporations and the very rich. How did such a bold reform effort pass in a polity wracked by partisan divisions and intense lobbying by special interests? What does Affordable Care mean-and what comes next? In this updated edition of Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (R), Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol-two of the nation's leading experts on politics and health care policy-provide a concise and accessible overview. They explain the political battles of 2009 and 2010, highlighting White House strategies, the deals Democrats cut with interest groups, and the impact of agitation by Tea Partiers and progressives. Jacobs and Skocpol spell out what the new law can do for everyday Americans, what it will cost, and who will pay. In a new section, they also analyze the impact the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. Above all, they explain what comes next, as critical yet often behind-the-scenes battles rage over implementing reform nationally and in the fifty states. Affordable Care still faces challenges at the state level despite the Court ruling. But, like Social Security and Medicare, it could also gain strength and popularity as the majority of Americans learn what it can do for them.