Klein consider the quality (and quantity) of response to (and for) status offenders at local community service outlets in seven different cities. By this method, the authors can determine whether such response practices conform with the ideological thrusts embedded in state legislation.

This book provides an overview of the dominant philosophical approaches and practices in handling status offenders--those children who habitually resist the control of their parents and schools, who run away from home, who drink and stay out after curfew. The three basic and competing social philosophies in responding to these troubled and troublesome youths--discussed at length in this book--are known as the treatment, deterrence, and normalization rationales. In examining these philosophies, the authors consider the quality and quantity of response to and for status offenders at local community service outlets in seven different cities. In this way, Maxson and Klein are able to determine whether such response practices conform with the ideological thrusts embedded in state legislation. The results will surprise many legislative and youth service policy professionals. Agency characteristics, service-delivery patterns, and youth clients do indeed reflect the treatment, deterrence, and normalization rationales, but in ways that have little bearing on the dominant philosophies embodied by state legislation. Special chapters are devoted to those minors most likely to slip through the safety-net of youth service --chronic runaways and street kids. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for lawmakers and policy developers.

Parenting today’s teens is not for cowards. Your teenager is facing unprecedented and confusing pressures, temptations, and challenges in today’s culture. Mark Gregston has helped teens and their parents through every struggle imaginable, and now he shares his biblical, practical insights with you in bite-size pieces. Punctuated with Scriptures, prayers, and penetrating questions, these one-page devotions will give you the wisdom and assurance you need to guide your teen through these years and reach the other side with relationships intact.

Written specifically for child- and youth-care professionals, teachers, and foster parents, No Such Thing As a Bad Kid is packed with information for anyone who lives or works with kids at risk. Based on the premise that misbehavior is a coded message, this empowering handbook guides you through the decoding process and, via hundreds of hands-on tips and sample dialogues, into approaches capable of revolutionizing your interactions with troubled children and their interactions with the world. Even parents of children not at risk will benefit from this book.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.