Children with neurodevelopmental disabilities such as mental retardation or autism present multiple challenges to their families, health care providers, and teachers. Professionals consulted by desperate parents often see the problems from their own angle only and diagnosis and intervention efforts wind up fragmented and ineffective. This book presents a model multidisciplinary approach to care, family-centered and collaborative, that has proven effective in practice. A pillar of the approach is recognition of the importance of performing culturally competent assessment and adjusting service delivery so that it is responsive to cultural differences. Detailed case stories illuminate the ways in which the approach can help children with different backgrounds and different disabilities. Most chapters include, besides references, study questions, lists of resources, and glossaries to facilitate easy comprehension by professionals with different backgrounds-in special education, communication sciences and disorders, clinical and counseling psychology, neuropsychology and psychiatry, social work, pediatrics-and program administrators as well as students, trainees and educated parents. Caring For Children With Neurodevelopmental Disabilities and Their Families constitutes a crucial new resource for all those professionally and personally concerned with these children. Children with neurodevelopmental disabilities such as mental retardation or autism present multiple challenges to their families, health care providers, and teachers. This book presents a model multidisciplinary approach to care, family-centered and collaborative, that has proven effective in practice.

Implementing Sustainable Development focuses on the challenge of turning international commitments and policy promises into action. Using examples and cases from around the U.S. and around the world, it examines the successful and failed efforts designed to address the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Based on broad research that started before the Earth Summit, Implementing Sustainable Development offers a practical and useful approach to identifying and addressing policy implementation challenges.

In the midst of great crisis, it is difficult to contemplate the future. In recent decades, determining what kind of future to imagine has been an ongoing challenge for millions of people around the world who have been subjected to war, terrorism, and civil disorder. While destruction of the environment has long been part of warfare, it has become increasingly important as environmental pressures have intensified in our time. Focusing on the challenges and issues that arise for those contemplating a way forward in the wake of catastrophic upheavals, Sustainable Development in Crisis Conditions takes a broad-based and integrative approach. What emerges is that the post-WWII reconstruction or nation-building perspectives are inadequate and inappropriate to most of the contemporary post-conflict challenges-a successful response requires a sustainable development approach, and Sustainable Development in Crisis Conditions is a preliminary exploration of this complex subject.