Strategies and Techniques in Family Health Practice for Empowering Children and Adolescents

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Pages:244
ISBN:0-7734-6283-X
978-0-7734-6283-0
Price:$179.95 + shipping
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In contrast to the traditional deficit perspective of working with children and adolescents, this book presents a strengths based family health perspective. The roles and functions of the family are being redefined in every domain of family life - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, economic, cultural, and social. Embedded in each of these domains are the seeds of family life that can either be nurtured or left to wither and die. The profound challenge is how to identify the seeds to nurture and the seeds to leave uncultivated.

Reviews

"This book represents multiple professional perspectives on family health such as, social work, psychology, and nursing and each author shares his or her own extensive practice experience to illuminate the subject matter. The book also provides specific practical practice guidelines for bringing families to health and maintaining them. [The editors] have made a significant contribution to the development of the family health perspective by the range of diverse chapters they have selected to include in their book. The book does a good job of demonstrating the continued development and maturation of the family health perspective. Finally, this book is an empowering, empathetic statement on children and adolescents and the families that care for them." - (from the Commendatory Preface) Lola M. Butler, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University

"Developing a holistic approach to social work practice requires a focused perspective on those formative institutions shaping complex behaviors in diverse arenas. Jennings, Gunther and Summers have contributed a rich analysis of family health practice as a focal point of analysis in problem areas generating professional service need. With the family health practice approach, new prisms arise in which to focus on the strengths in social interactions, to find healthy sectors in areas of distress and disorder, and to build on inherent core structures in assessing and planning strengths-based interventions for problem areas. This new lense in which to view practice fosters a strength perspective viewing behaviors in the ecological framework of family health and well-being ... This text provides practitioners with tools to be able to apply a family health perspective across an array of complex and difficult problem areas. Insights using the perspective are garnered in such challenging practice areas as in work with violence, health threats, and mental health challenges. The family health perspective offers a lense to view the diversity of family experiences and forms during challenges to well-being while focusing on strengths and adaptiveness. It provides a framework for family analysis which has multiple applications to practice interventions ... Family health perspectives enrich our repertoire of how to view helping those in need and those threatened by poverty and discrimination. It is an innovative perspective which adds breadth and optimism to social work practice approaches. This is a text which should complement practice texts required in social work courses." - Professor Ronald J. Mancoske, Southern University at New Orleans

"This book represents a solid addition to the literature on social work practice with a, family health focus. The authors have provided clear demarcations between traditional models I practice that focus on either the individual or the family and the family health model which is concerned with broader issues that include the community and environmental pressures. The topics of each chapter illustrate Maier areas (HIV, drug abuse, violence, etc.) where families are 1ikely to experience difficulty. The breadth of topics is a significant strength of this book. The book emphasizes that human service practitioners can play additional roles with families, particularly consulting and collaborating in efforts to improve the family’s health ... The authors have documented well the various challenges facing families and have relied both on classic research findings as well as more recent data sources. With a wealth of assessment instruments described in various chapters, the book appears aimed at the graduate school level ... Important topics such as empowerment, spirituality, LGBT families, and cultural competence are addressed throughout the different chapters. This attention to current issues in social work practice should help make this text of value to a wide audience." - Professor Grafton Hull, University of Utah

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Family Health Perspective: Beyond Family-Centered Practice to Empower Children and Youth (Mary Ann Jennings, Ph.D.; Anne B. Summers, D.S.W.; Frank G. Kauffman, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
2. When the bough breaks … Treatment of Children with HIV/AIDS from a Family Health Perspective (Michele Garrison, M.S.W., Southwest Missouri State University)
3. Truancy: Engaging the Family (Regina Goff, M.S.W., Family Advocate, Truancy Court,Springfield Missouri Public Schools)
4. Ethical Implications of Adolescent Suicide from a Family Health Perspective (Joan E. Goldberg D.S.W., Private Practice, Bethesda, MD, Anne B. Summers, D.S.W., Southwest Missouri State University)
5. Adolescent Substance Abuse and the Family Health Social Work Perspective (Stephen Brannen, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
6. The Most Despised – Juvenile Sex Offenders: How The Most Despised and Their Families Can Be Healthy (Hal Agler, M.S.W., Private Practice, Springfield, Missouri)
7.Strategies in Family Health Practice: Inclusion of Play Therapy (Glenda F. Lester Short, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
8.Public Health Services to Families: Best Practice Approaches for Children and Adolescent Well-Being (Harrison Smith, Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University)
9. Family Health Practice and Chronic Illness Among Children and Adolescents (John Gunther, Ph.D.; Mary Sue Marz, R.N., Ph.D.,Eastern Michigan University)
10.Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Family Health Issues (Brenda A. Riemer, Ph.D.; Jeanne L. Thomas, Ph.D.;Eastern Michigan University)
11. Children of Violence: Family Health in Troubled Families (Joan C. McClennen, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
12. Healthy Solutions for Immigrant Hispanic Youth from a Family-Health Perspective (Susan Dollar, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
13. Family-Health-Practice Strategies and Techniques to Empower Children and Families in Foster-Care Services (Michele Day, M.S.W.; Catherine Hawkins, M.S.W.; and Mary Ann Jennings, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)
14. Keeping Families Together by Promoting Family Health (Frank G. Kauffman, Ph.D., Southwest Missouri State University)

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