What lasting impact has foster care had on the adult lives of former foster children? Noting how trends in expectations and outcomes in foster care have changed over the past 30 years, this comprehensive and critical review of the impact foster care has had on children provides a framework for the critical assessment of trends in programs and policies; identifies what is known and not known concerning the impact of foster care; and offers recommendations for future data collection and research, as well as program and policy development. A welcome addition to the literature for program administrators, policymakers, and researchers in the child welfare field.

Advancing health equity calls for a new kind of leader and a new approach to leadership development. Clinical Scholars and Culture of Health Leaders are mid-career leadership development programs supporting the emergence of collaborative and systemic approaches, bringing teams of leaders together with others in the community to work toward the common goal of lessening health disparities. In each chapter of this book, the authors share how they tackled seemingly intractable issues, making headway through applying the principles of adaptive leadership in unbounded systems to create not only outcomes but also impacts on health disparities and, in some cases, sustainable and scalable applications. In this volume, you will learn how Clinical Scholars and Culture of Health Leaders programs curated and measured the successful learning and development of these dedicated health-equity advocates.

Offers a review of the latest literature but moreover a practical guide essential to professionals who give their expert opinions to courts in child care cases.

This book illuminates the process of child psychological assessment in community psychology through discussion, theory, and case studies of collaborative, systemic treatment of children and their parents. "Assessing Children in the Urban Community" presents a semi-structured form of collaborative psychological assessment, designed to help clients gain new insights and make changes in their lives. Traditional psychological assessment focuses on diagnosis and treatment but has been slow to include contextual elements, particularly social and cultural contexts into the assessment process and psychological report. Clients receiving services in a community psychology clinic pay for their treatment through state welfare coverage. They cannot choose their providers, they cannot always determine the length and course of their mental health care, they often do not have access to transportation to begin services, to continue them, or to take advantage of follow-up recommendations. The Therapeutic Assessment model is particularly adaptable to community psychology because it allows maximum interaction in the assessment process and promotes participation and collaboration in an often dis-empowering system. This book will be relevant to clinical psychologists, community psychologists, social workers, family therapists, graduate students in psychology, social work, marriage and family therapists, and counseling programs.

This up-to-date and comprehensive resource by leaders in child welfare is the first book to reflect the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The text serves as a single-source reference for a wide array of professionals who work in children, youth, and family services in the United States-policymakers, social workers, psychologists, educators, attorneys, guardians ad litem, and family court judges& mdash;and as a text for students of child welfare practice and policy. Features include: * Organized around ASFA's guiding principles of well-being, safety, and permanency * Focus on evidence-based "best practices" * Case examples integrated throughout * First book to include data from the first round of National Child and Family Service Reviews Topics discussed include the latest on prevention of child abuse and neglect and child protective services; risk and resilience in child development; engaging families; connecting families with public and community resources; health and mental health care needs of children and adolescents; domestic violence; substance abuse in the family; family preservation services; family support services and the integration of family-centered practices in child welfare; gay and lesbian adolescents and their families; children with disabilities; and runaway and homeless youth. The contributors also explore issues pertaining to foster care and adoption, including a focus on permanency planning for children and youth and the need to provide services that are individualized and culturally and spiritually responsive to clients. A review of salient systemic issues in the field of children, youth, and family services completes this collection.

Assessing prospective adoptive parents, foster carers, kinship carers and special guardians is an extremely complex task, and one that happens within a pressurized time frame. Currently, assessments draw substantially on interviews, which can generate a lot of information but little analysis to enable professionals to establish a meaningful understanding of parenting capacity. Children with histories of trauma, loss and hurt need to join families in which parents exhibit the ability to be good at relationships, are able to manage their own stress and bond with the child in their care. Now fully updated and expanded to cover the assessment of kinship carers and special guardians, this book combines the latest findings from neuroscience with research on what makes good assessments and provides guidance and tools for making thorough, analytical and effective assessments. With contributions from leading experts including Dan Hughes, Jonathan Baylin, Kim Golding and Julie Selwyn, it will provide you with the information you need to ensure the best possible chance of placement success.

There is a profound crisis in the United States' foster care system, Jill Duerr Berrick writes in this expertly researched, passionately written book. No state has passed the federally mandated Child and Family Service Review; two-thirds of the state systems have faced class-action lawsuits demanding change; and most tellingly, well over half of all children who enter foster care never go home. The field of child welfare has lost its way and is neglecting its fundamental responsibility to the most vulnerable children and families in America. The family stories Berrick weaves throughout the chapters provide a vivid backdrop for her statistics. Amanda, raised in foster care, began having children of her own while still a teen and lost them to the system when she became addicted to drugs. Tracy, brought up by her schizophrenic single mother, gave birth to the first of eight children at age fourteen and saw them all shuffled through foster care as she dealt drugs and went to prison. Both they and the other individuals that Berrick features spent years without adequate support from social workers or the government before finally achieving a healthier life; many people never do. But despite the clear crisis in child welfare, most calls for reform have focused on unproven prevention methods, not on improving the situation for those already caught in the system. Berrick argues that real child welfare reform will only occur when the centerpiece of child welfare - reunification, permanency, and foster care - is reaffirmed. Take Me Home reminds us that children need long-term caregivers who can help them develop and thrive. When troubled parents can't change enough to permit reunification, alternative permanency options must be pursued. And no reform will matter for the hundreds of thousands of children entering foster care each year in America unless their experience of out-of-home care is considerably better than the one many now experience. Take Me Home offers prescriptions for policy change and strategies for parents, social workers, and judges struggling with permanency decisions. Readers will come away reinvigorated in their thinking about how to get children to the homes they need.

As child and family interventions assume greater international application, it will be helpful to examine the various ways in which service innovations are being evaluated. As demonstrated in the seminar from which these chapters resulted, only by sharing our specific professional interests, our too frequent problems in measurement, our despair in implementing complicated studies, and our successes can we advance the evaluation of human services and their outcomes. This volume considers a variety of programs and issues in the field of child and family services. While different perspectives are evident among the authors in terms of their focus and/or emphasis, there is common concern about the value of examining each program or service so as to maximize its impact as well as its potential for dissemination. Intervention research should spur and motivate cross-national efforts not only among researchers but also among social workers and other practitioners from diverse professions engaged in the delivery of human services. Such collaboration would contribute to the ultimate goals of achieving greater clarity about the specifics of "best practices" in child and family services, protocols for assessing outcomes, and ways of improving service delivery. How then can researchers and policymakers in diverse settings within diverse countries improve practice and service delivery on behalf of children and families? What particular program findings can be generalized to improve services? How can we share and implement new solutions? The contributions to this volume address such questions from varying international perspectives. Contributors provide answers and generate discussion points for consideration by practitioners as well as researchers. The book is a must for social work parishioners in areas involving the delivery of goods as well as services. Tiziano Vecchiato is scientific director of the Fondazione Emanuela Zancan, Padua, Italy. Anthony N. Maluccio is professor of social work at Boston College, Graduate School of Social Work, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Cinzia Canali is research associate at the Fondazione Emanuela Zancan, Padua, Italy.

This Handbook examines core questions still remaining in the field of child maltreatment. It addresses major challenges in child maltreatment work, starting with the question of what child abuse and neglect is exactly. It then goes on to examine why maltreatment occurs and what its consequences are. Next, it turns to prevention, treatment and intervention, as well as legal perspectives. The book studies the issue from the perspective of the broader international and cross-cultural human experience. Its aim is to review what is known, but even more importantly, to examine what remains to be known to make progress in helping abused children, their families, and their communities.

This practice-oriented text presents evidence-based assessment methods and interventions that have been extensively field-tested in child welfare settings. The contributors offer empirical and field insights, comprehensive treatment models, and curricula in key areas such as child maltreatment, substance abuse, parent training, social skills, and youth employment interventions. For the professional reader, the book offers real-world guidance on social work practice, from hiring opportunities within a system to promoting lasting change as families and their issues grow increasingly complex. These chapters also take significant steps toward future improvements in child protection systems as the field evolves toward being more coordinated, effective, and professional. Included in the coverage: Legal requisites for social work practice in child abuse and neglect. The integrated model for human service delivery in child welfare. Risk assessment: issues and implementation in child protective services. Substance use and abuse: screening tools and assessment instruments. The process of intervention with multi-problem families. Preventative services for children and adolescents. Its multi-level approach makes Evidence-Informed Assessment and Practice in Child Welfare an essential professional development text for social workers, particularly those new to the job, as well as a progressive blueprint for social work administrators.