Becoming a child welfare professional should come with a warning: "beware - this may change you forever and can be dangerous." The change, however, may be good if you can learn to cope with the stress of the work and grow from the experience. Secondary Traumatic Stress and the Child Welfare Professional, a first-of-its kind book, presents the tools to help child welfare practitioners and agency managers identify and provide practical and appropriate interventions. This book is based on the authors' ten-year study of over 600 child welfare practitioners' experience with traumatic stress and child welfare.

Presents the tools to help child welfare practitioners and agency managers identify and provide practical and appropriate interventions.

This comprehensive reference offers a robust framework for introducing and sustaining trauma-responsive services and culture in child welfare systems. Organized around concepts of safety, permanency, and well-being, chapters describe innovations in child protection, violence prevention, foster care, and adoption services to reduce immediate effects of trauma on children and improve long-term development and maturation. Foundations and interventions for practice include collaborations with families and community entities, cultural competency, trauma-responsive assessment and treatment, promoting trauma-informed parenting, and, when appropriate, working toward reunification of families. The book’s chapters on agency culture also address staffing, supervisory, and training issues, planning and implementation, and developing a competent, committed, and sturdy workforce. Among the topics covered: Trauma-informed family engagement with resistant clients. Introducing evidence-based trauma treatment in preventive services. Working with resource parents for trauma-informed foster care. Use of implementation science principles in program development for sustainability. Trauma informed and secondary traumatic stress informed organizational readiness assessments. Caseworker training for trauma practice and building worker resiliency. Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems ably assists psychology professionals of varied disciplines, social workers, and mental health professionals applying trauma theory and trauma-informed family engagement to clinical practice and/or research seeking to gain strategies for creating trauma-informed agency practice and agency culture. It also makes a worthwhile text for a child welfare training curriculum.

This workbook provides tools for self-assessment, guidelines and activities for addressing vicarious traumatization, and exercises to use with groups of helpers.

Within a historical and contemporary context, this book examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. In addition to describing the major problems facing the field, the book highlights service innovations that have been developed in recent years. The resulting picture is encouraging, especially if certain major program reforms I are implemented and agencies are able to concentrate resources in a focused manner. The volume emphasizes families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies. The book considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential services—where social work has an important role. Authors address the many fields of practice in which child and family services are provided or that involve substantial numbers of social work programs, such as services to adolescent parents, child mental health, education, and juvenile justice agencies. This new edition will continue to serve as a fundamen­tal introduction for new practitioners, as well as summary of recent developments for experienced practitioners.

"For too many traumatized children and their families, chronic stressors such as poverty, substance abuse, and family or community violence--coupled with an overburdened care system/m-/pose seemingly insurmountable barriers to treatment. This empowering book provides a user-friendly blueprint for making the most of limited resources to help those considered the "toughest cases." Evidence-based strategies are presented for effectively integrating individualized treatment with services at the home, school, and community levels. Written in an accessible, modular format with reproducible forms and step-by-step guidelines for assessment and intervention, the approach is grounded in the latest knowledge about child traumatic stress. It has been recognized as a treatment of choice by state mental health agencies nationwide"--

This book is a practical guide to developing resilient learners by equipping educators with trauma informed practices and behaviour support strategies.