This book highlights key principles emerging from the process of implementing an entire community and government approach to supporting families at risk of vulnerability. Drawing on the expertise of a number of practitioners and researchers, it also examines the efficacy of some of the early intervention and prevention strategies developed through the Australian Communities for Children initiative. It will be of particular interest to community services, education and child welfare practitioners and policy makers involved with, or contemplating involvement in, implementing a place-based collective impact approach to child development, wellbeing and protection. How can we better engage with families at risk in a digital world? How can we deliver holistic, integrated support? How can we redesign our family support systems? What kind of leadership and governance will it take to implement the kind of systems change that delivers improved outcomes? These are critical questions we need to engage with if we are to collaboratively redesign inadequate, siloed approaches and build family-friendly communities that improve the lives of children and families.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

The measure of a society's health is how well it takes care of the youngest generation. By this standard, we fail. But All Kids Are Our Kids offers an approach to unleash the extraordinary power of community when people unite around a widely shared vision of healthy child and adolescent development. All Kids Are Our Kids introduces forty Developmental Assets—building blocks of healthy development that are essential for all youth, regardless of their background. The challenge for all segments of the community—families, neighbors, schools, congregations, employers, youth organizations, and more—is to share in the responsibility for taking action to ensure that all kids have what they need to grow up healthy, successful, and caring. This new edition includes new evidence, cites successful cases, and makes recommendations for energizing individuals, families, and community action. Praise for All Kids Are Our Kids "A practical, concrete blueprint for helping young people succeed because of supportive communities." —Donald T. Floyd, Jr., president and CEO, National 4-H Council "For two decades, Peter Benson has been America's most eloquent and persuasive voice for a new, positive approach to enhancing the lives of our nation's youth. If policy makers, practitioners, and researchers read only one book about how to act in support of our nation's youth, then this is it!" —Richard M. Lerner, Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and director, Institute forApplied Research in Youth Development, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, Tufts University "Peter Benson continues to remind us of how far short of the mark we have fallen in meeting the needs of our youngest generation. But then he provides a gift: a unifying vision that we can all rally around: parents, neighbors, youth-serving organizations, and ultimately whole communities committed to the healthy development of all our kids." —Judy Vredenburgh, president and CEO, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America "Benson's approach is the best formula we have for building communities to meet the developmental needs of young people. Anyone who is concerned about the future of our society should read this book." —William Damon, professor of education, Stanford University, and director, Stanford Center on Adolescence

We live in a world of changing hearts and changing communities. Spiralling family violence and child abuse and neglect, often related to intergenerational trauma, are severely impacting many communities. On an international level threats from nuclear war, climate change, and artificial general intelligence in the hands of autocratic dictators, present disturbing challenges to our future. If we want to see change in families, communities, and nations it needs to begin in the motivational centre of our being. The scourge of insatiable approval-seeking, alienation from the Creator, intergenerational trauma, and the debilitating effects of a broken heart and spirit, simmers within us. How can we experience change? We need to identify what needs to change in what is motivating us and discover how we can be empowered to change deeply entrenched habits. As well as a change in the thought patterns of our minds, we need to experience a pervasive pivot in our attitudes. This publication draws from arguably the most significant change movement in history, exploring how we can discover the power to change and contribute toward transforming broken communities in an uncertain world of accelerating change.

There has been considerable research and authorship on child sexual abuse, however, much of this research has focused on adult perpetrators and child victims. Less attention has been paid to children’s harmful sexual behaviour and the multitude of influences. Harmful Sexual Behaviour in Young Children and Pre-Teens provides evidence-based understanding on: typical sexual development versus harmful sexual behaviour; the prevalence and impacts associated with harmful sexual behaviour; Australian laws, policies and educator responsibilities; responses and support systems for children who display harmful sexual behaviour; and the implications and challenges for future practice. This book provides understandings that directly respond to the recent Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommendation 10.1 to address (a) primary prevention strategies to educate family, community members, carers, and professionals about preventing harmful sexual behaviours (b) secondary prevention strategies to ensure early intervention when harmful sexual behaviours are developing and (c) tertiary intervention strategies to address harmful sexual behaviours.. The authors present a review of psychological, sociological, legal, and educational research to inform and support professionals involved in the wellbeing and education of children to understand, manage, and reduce dysfunctional sexual development in children.

It’s a startling reality that more American children are victims—and perpetrators—of violence than those of any other developed country. Yet unlike the other nations, the United States has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Compelling, readable, and interdisciplinary, A Child’s Right to a Healthy Environment provides an abundance of skilled observation, important findings, and keen insights to place children’s well-being in the vanguard of human rights concerns, both in the United States and globally. Within this volume, authors examine the impediments to the crucial goals of justice, safety, dignity, well-being, and meaning in children’s lives, factors as varied as socioeconomic stressors, alienated, disengaged parents, and corrosive moral lessons from the media. The complex role of religious institutions in promoting and, in many cases, curtailing children’s rights is analyzed, as are international efforts by advocates and policymakers to address major threats to children’s development, including: War and natural disasters. Environmental toxins (e.g., malaria and lead poisoning). The child obesity epidemic. Gun violence. Child slavery and trafficking. Toxic elements in contemporary culture. A Child’s Right to a Healthy Environment is a powerful call to action for researchers and professionals in developmental, clinical child, school, and educational psychology as well as psychiatry, pediatrics, social work, general and special education, sociology, and other fields tasked with improving children’s lives.