"The serious consequences of child abuse or maltreatment are among the most challenging things therapists encounter. This volume integrates results from the latest research showing the importance of early traumatization into a compact, practical and evidence-based guide for practitioners. This text first overviews our current knowledge of the effects of childhood maltreatment on psychiatric and psychological health, then provides diagnostic guidance, and subsequently goes on to profile promising and effective evidence-based interventions. It helps the practitioner or student to know what to look for, what questions need to be asked, how to handle the sensitive ethical implications, and what are promising avenues for effective coping."--Publisher.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

This book addresses new avenues in child abuse prevention research that will expand our capacity to protect children. These new avenues result from the emergence of new research methods made possible through technologic advances, an understanding of the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and learning and the entrance of many young scholars in the field. The book explores what these avenues produce in terms of clarifying the complex problems that continue to limit our progress in addressing child maltreatment and promoting optimal child development. Specifically, the book showcases individual contributions from emerging scholars and show how these scholars use the frameworks and advanced methods to shape their work, apply their findings and define their learning communities. The book highlights the benefits of creating explicit and extended opportunities for researchers to network across disciplines and areas of interest. The primary authors are young scholars from universities across the U.S. who have worked together as Fellows of the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being – seeking innovations to prevent child abuse. Through this program, the Fellows have engaged in a robust self-generating learning network designed to create the type of ongoing professional linkages and decision-making style that fosters an interdisciplinary and team planning approach to research design and policy formation.

Parenting and Substance Abuse is the first book to report on pioneering efforts to move the treatment of substance-abusing parents forward by embracing their roles and experiences as mothers and fathers directly and continually across the course of treatment.

Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves-they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains-including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems-and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.