ABSTRACT
Use a strengths perspective for working with your younger clients!
Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model presents new insights into successfully working with children by concentrating on their capabilities and resilience. This book explores the continuum of children’s needs and challenges from early childhood through adolescence. This text also supports child-centered and strengths-oriented approaches to intervention with children and introduces specific strategies for maximizing pro-social behaviors, self-concept, learning, and positive peer relationships in children at home, at school, and in the community.
Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth shows how children’s rights have slowly evolved over many years, from children’s status as property in the 1600s to the twentieth-century innovations that give a child a specific legal status with a certain amount of freedom and self-determination. By emphasizing the self-concept and self-esteem guidelines outlined by this book, social workers, mental health specialists, and childcare professionals can help children transition into healthy adults, despite hardships, disabilities, or parent negligence. Chapters highlighting interview and assessment techniques as well as media-directed, creative child therapies will enhance your counseling and intervention practices.
Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth provides you with insight on:
- the relationships between children and family environment—from two-parent families to foster families
- child socialization and peer relationships—in school and around the community
- adolescence—gender roles, ethnic and racial diversity, sexual orientation, and adult transitioning
- educational needs—teacher expectations, special education, diversity, home schooling
- and more!