Editorial

Most human services are still organized by clock-time and by the expectations created by layers of policy, bureaucracy, and material resources. These expectations often interfere with the ability of professionals to meet the needs of children and families. There are other ways of doing things that have long been known, even tried on a rare occasion. We should continue to promote these ideas, in the hope of better service to families.     

Chapter 4: Social Learning Principals:

No abstract available for this article.     

The Development of a Parent Support Group as a Means of Initiating Family Involvement in a Residential Program

SUMMARY

Working with the families of children in residential care is critical to the success of the placement. For a variety of reasons, parents of adolescents in one residential setting were not receiving adequate services during placement. A parent support and education group was designed and implemented to provide opportunities for parents to access support, learn new parenting skills and, ultimately, optimize their relationships with their children. The responses of both parents and staff to this program were favorable. The group is now a regular component of the organization's range of services, and served as a springboard to enhance family involvement in other program areas.     

Chapter 11: Therapeutic Foster Parent:

Training can help foster parents manage reactions to the foster child, avoid stress and burnout, and cope with the difficult times so that placement is sustained. Training is necessary so foster parents will not take the child's aggressive behavior personally, will avoid becoming embroiled in power struggles, and will be less likely to become hurt or embarrassed by the child's behavior. Training will involve individual consultation by the social worker as well as participation in a foster parent group. Staff will assistn foster parents to develop behavioral management and communication skills as well as their own coping and self-control skills. Foster parents are given permission to take care of their own needs, are assisted in developing stress management skills, learn how to increase their own self-esteem, and learn to use cognitive approaches to handle their own emotions. Foster parents develop an understanding that they cannot change the child's behavior but can only change the way which they respond to the child, which may provide the child opportunities to change his or her own behavior.     

Finding Identity in Family Work

SUMMARY

The family has always enjoyed an elevated status in Ireland, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that family-based intervention work really found expression in a new division of child and youth care: community child care-workers. This paper introduces readers to an area of child and youth care work in Ireland devoted to an ecological understanding of the child “at risk” and working with the child and the child's family outside of a residential or institutional setting. The paper includes a brief interview with a community child care-worker, observations from a master's student in social care who has also worked in community child care, and concludes by reviewing 12 key areas community child care-workers must address if their status is to be secured in the Irish child and     

Chapter IV: Child Welfare Education:

No abstract available for this article.     

Creating an Extrafamilial Living Environment

Abstract

As human actors, the staff members and children who inhabit a residential center do not just react to their physical and social environment. In many ways they can be said to enact or create it.     

Guidelines in Child and Youth Care Family Work

SUMMARY

There are many paths that can be taken with the families we encounter in our work. It is this richness in options that can make the child and youth care approach so powerful. However, amongst each potential path there are a number of common guideposts that serve as markers for our interactions with families. These guiding principles are described through the use of examples from a family in a program for teens who are parenting.     

Subject Index

No abstract available for this article.     

Reducing Black Adolescents' Drug Use:

This article focuses on prevention and reduction of drug use among Black adolescents. The family is considered to be a major source in preparing children to handle adolescent stresses such as drug involvement pressures. Primary prevention of drug use begins in early childhood. The family is an underutilized and minimally acknowledged resource in drug abuse prevention efforts. The discussion centers on a review of research findings intimately related to adolescent drug use and Black family issues. An argument is made for a national family policy in support of all American famiiies. Young famiIies are a prime area for the investment or resources. Now and in the future, the American family represents the best primary prevention program available.     

Chapter 8. Listening to At-Risk Youth

Abstract

In this chapter I describe the micro “risk society” of Limerick City and St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project in terms of the social and cultural background of the interviewees, their perceived family and community identity, and their wider socialisation influences. The project is situated down one of the notorious Limerick lanes made famous in a deftly realized and beautifully written story of a boy coming of age during the 1930s and 1940s in Catholic Ireland, Angela's Ashes, and has been a safe haven for children and youth since 1977. In this chapter I present direct quotations from my young interviewees organised around the risk concept in their own dialect and inflections.

Past and present students of St. Augustine's are viewed in the context of family, school, and community whilst considering three broad questions: What are the important risk factors associated with each setting? What factors at the individual level are associated with resilient outcomes? What mechanisms at the social ecological level promote resilience in individuals?     

Conceptual and Clinical Issues in the Treatment of Adolescent Alcohol and Substance Misusers

This paper describes a system of care and the clinical issues that are central to the delivery of alcoholism and for substance abuse services to adolescents. Adolescent services can be provided in a variety of settings. Criteria are identified which can distinguish which level of care is most appropriate for the presenting clinical condition of the adolescent.     

Chapter 17: The Community as an Advocate for Youth:

State treatment foster care programs established by the National Youth Advocate Program are described in terms of youth served, homes established, treatment program, implementation problems, and evaluation procedures.     

Out-of-Home Care Programs in Argentina: Contradictions Between Effective Protection and Long-Term Permanency

According to UNICEF, in 2011 nearly 14,700 children lacking parental care were attended by public protection measures, such as out-of-home care devices. The aim of this work is to account for the operating conditions of such interventions in Buenos Aires province. Our approach agrees with methodological perspectives guiding current interventions aimed at childhood, which consider children as subject-bearing rights and request all social institutions watch their well-being. The analysis exploits documentary and primary sources of information based on interviews with actors involved in public special protection devices. Our focus is directed towards the analysis of suggested and effective conditions of permanence in special protective measures and, therefore, in exiting from such devices. One of the main conclusions is that bureaucratic requirements aimed to establish an explicit time horizon for public cash transfers face conflicts with more general guidelines that should guide interventions with childhood.     

Chapter 2. From Risk to At-Risk

Abstract

The American economist, Frank Knight (1921), introduced risk as far back as the early 1920s with his analysis of profit legitimisation. In the profession of law, by the latter part of the 19th century risk had entered into mainstream social law in Europe (Ewald, 1991). Risk discourse seems to have regained popularity since the 1970s. Despite the voluminous work published since then with over three thousand books and articles by the end of the 1990s (Renn, 1998) there is no consensus regarding the risk construct itself, as it is approached from so many differing perspectives and disciplines. Many researchers tended, when writing about risk and children and youth, to focus on single variables such as intense interparental conflict that exacerbates maladjustment in children. This has now changed since the introduction of population health child and youth care perspectives. We are now far more interested in co-occurring adversities and the total, or whole, environment of a child. This chapter explores how and why a child or youth might be considered at risk exploring educational environments, the world of insurance, the natural world, medical discourse, and the world of the individual.