ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses benefits and challenges of developing formal and informal collaboration strategies with professionals and other adults who serve this population. Challenging youth are masters at triangulating teachers and parents, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and so forth. Triangulation and hierarchal distortions are two types of structural arrangements within families that limit growth and flexibility. Counselors work with parents to achieve a hierarchal arrangement that puts the parents back in charge, strengthens generational boundaries, enforces reasonable rules, adjusts to changing contexts, and provides for both mutual support and autonomy of the youth. The Multisystemic Therapy approach views individuals as being nested with a complex network of interconnected systems that encompass individual, family, and environmental factors that include peers, neighborhoods, schools. MST strives to promote behavior change in the youth's natural environment using existing strengths as levers of change. Wubbolding describes self-evaluation as the cornerstone of reality therapy. Self-evaluation might also be the cornerstone of effective engagement.
