Unconditional Care in Context reclaims problems of ecological adversity -poverty, racism, housing instability, community disadvantage, food insecurity, and social disconnection - as central to understanding and working with system-involved children and families. Child-serving systems typically define the struggles of these children and their families through a disorder lens of psychiatric diagnosis and family dysfunction. The interconnected burdens of financial stress, exclusion, disrupted parenting, and social isolation that regularly confront these families are often neglected or minimized. Without attention to these issues, intervention is limited to reactive strategies that require children and families to fail before they can receive support. Unconditional Care in Context reviews key sources of adversity and the efforts to undertake "macro level" intervention: system reform, program innovation and policy initiatives that address key sources of ecological adversity. These strategies, at the level of school campuses, neighborhoods, and child-serving systems themselves, often provide universal services that make prevention possible. When these supports are provided to families in a timely way children may not need treatment and parents are spared intrusive system interventions. Unconditional Care in Context also offers a roadmap for addressing issues of context and ecological adversity when individual work with children and families is necessary or is pursued by parents. This book is a call for the field of human service to reconnect with the concrete realities of families' real circumstances and enlarge its focus to include practices that are truly ecologically-informed.

This clinician-friendly guide presents a model for engaging the most challenging children and families who are served by the child welfare, mental health, juvenile justice, and special educations systems. These children are among the most troubled clients that treatment providers will ever encounter. They have been failed by every adult, every treatment modality, and every system of care that they have encountered.
Unconditional Care, a breakthrough guide from the founder and clinical director of California's Seneca Center for Children and Families, offers both a theoretical model and practical guidelines for working with this most difficult group of children. The approach weaves together attachment theory and learning theory into a coherent relationship-based intervention strategy built around a no-fail policy: a child can never be discharged from a program for exhibiting the behaviors that resulted in the placement. Professionals working with these families instead focus on re-building relationships that teach children to secure safe and supportive relationships with caregivers using new behaviors and skills to replace the destructive ones that have, until now, organized their worldview. The concept of unconditional care allows, for the first time, a safe space for youth to reconstruct their perceptions of themselves and those who care for them.
Rich case examples, quick-reference bullets and boxes, and sample assessment and planning worksheets make this a handy clinical reference and training tool for mental health and child welfare professionals.