Improve services for children and youth with new concepts, different perspectives, and up-to-date information

How Institutions are Shaping the Future of Our Children: For Better or for Worse? explores the positive and negative impacts of social institutions on child and adolescent well-being. Experts in the fields of social work and child welfare provide a broad perspective on how to improve outcomes for children and adolescents who receive institutional services either directly or indirectly. This book contains innovative strategies for reducing the negative outlook for children and families in shelters, foster homes, and residential treatment centers.

This book offers improvements for care services at such locations as: residential institutions state custody and foster homes schools youth development organizations urban public housing developments homeless shelters In How Institutions are Shaping the Future of Our Children, you'll discover current case studies that show how certain groups--such as minorities and economically challenged children and families--are stigmatized by the current child welfare system. You'll also find new evidence of the detrimental effects that can occur as a result of institutionalization and the need to find alternatives to removing children and adolescents from family-style environments. This book contains tables to clarify the findings of these case studies, references to further your reading, and detailed descriptions of plans and programs that you can implement in your own social work practice.

How Institutions are Shaping the Future of Our Children presents new ways to create positive environments for children and adolescents, including: strengths-based approaches to practice with children with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances custody planning for the children of HIV-infected women discipline-specific education for child protection caseworkers creating supportive staff-youth relationships within all institutions multiple family group interventions which help to strengthen homeless families in preparation to transition to permanent housing the School Development Program, Child Development Project, and Comprehensive Quality Programming--interventions for preventing school drop-outs Life Plans for post-institutionalized youth

Twelve contributions by practitioners in the fields of social work and child welfare explore the positive and negative impacts of various social institutions on child and adolescent well being. Topics include, for example, minority overrepresentation in children's services, permanency planning for the care of HIV/AIDS affected children, and how school environments contribute to violent behavior in youth. The volume has been simultaneously co-published as Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, vol. 9, nos. 1/2, 2004.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

How Institutions are Shaping the Future of Our Children explores the positive and negative impacts of social institutions on child and adolescent well-being. Experts in the fields of social work and child welfare provide a broad perspective on how to improve outcomes for children and adolescents who receive institutional services either directly or indirectly. This book contains innovative strategies for reducing the negative outlook of children and families in shelters, foster homes, and residential treatment centers.