Many of today's parents struggle with their approach in raising a healthy daughter within our complex culture. Never before have girls been faced with so many pressures to live up to confusing and often contradictory cultural expectations. These burdens are intense, newly evolving, and are affecting girls at earlier and earlier ages. As girls of all ages listen to the messages of popular culture, they gather that their worth is based upon a perfect appearance, the ability to gain attention and approval from others, and their accrual of accomplishments. As girls absorb these expectations, they begin to believe they are not good enough as they are. They are not able to develop an authentic sense of self because they lose themselves in trying to become what the culture dictates. It is not surprising that with all of these pressures, girls are experiencing stress, emptiness, and skyrocketing rates of mental health problems. Parents know that something is very wrong with today's culture, but they can't quite put a name on the problem. Many feel helpless as popular cultural influences pervade modern life at every turn. This book, however, provides parents with reassurance that their influence can make a significant difference in their daughters' development. Parents are empowered to make positive choices to help girls learn to resist cultural pressures and to successfully navigate the transitions they will face in their journey as girls in today's culture. Written in an engaging, practical style, Laura Choate draws from research and counseling literature to provide parents with tools they can use to teach their daughters the power of resilience. The book begins with a portrait of the contemporary adolescent girl's environment, including an in-depth exploration of cultural pressures and an overview of how these pressures influence girls' physical, cognitive, and social development. In the second part of the book, parents learn about five resilience dimensions that girls need not only to survive, but to thrive as they develop during girlhood and adolescence. Practical tools for instilling resilience regarding girls' positive body image, healthy relationships with friends and romantic partners, and management of high-pressure academic environments through a redefinition of what it means to be successful are all discussed extensively.

"Grounded in decades of clinical experience, this practical book presents a research-informed framework for delivering parent guidance as a stand-alone intervention or adjunct to child therapy. It delineates flexible strategies to enhance family relationships and parenting skills and find new solutions to struggles around discipline, homework, bedtime, meals, screen time, and other daily routines. Coaching can be tailored for parents dealing with any child mental health or behavioral challenge. Assessment, treatment planning, clinical decision making, and progress monitoring are detailed step by step. The book features illustrative case material and 34 reproducible/downloadable clinical tools"--

What about the kids already there? How do they do when a child with a challenging past joins a family by adoption? When experienced parents decide to adopt an older child or a sibling group, they jump through all kinds of bureaucratic hoops â?? background checks, interviews, group meetings, reading assignments, classes, etc. But most often the typically developing children these adults are already parenting (whether through birth or adoption) are left out of the process, informed that a new kid is coming, and simply expected to â??adjustâ?? to the addition of another sibling. The addition of a child with a history of neglect or trauma cannot be a seamless transition. The expectations of everyone involved â?? parents, new siblings, and, yes, professionals facilitating the adoption â?? must be realistic, taking into account that the new child will need special attention that may take away time and attention from the already resident kids, that family life is likely to be turned topsy turvy until appropriate counseling and support are in place, that relationships will change. Therapist Arleta James is certainly not the first person to recognize this, but she is the first to do something about it. Brothers and Sisters in Adoption offers insights and examples and sturdy, practical, proven tools for helping newly configured families prepare, accept, react, and mobilize to become a new and different family meeting the practical, physical and emotional needs of all its members. These well prepared and supported families are the ones who thrive!

Safe, nurturing, and positive parent-child interactions lay the foundations for healthy child development. How children are raised in their early years and beyond affects many different aspects of their lives, including brain development, language, social skills, emotional regulation, mental and physical health, health risk behavior, and the capacity to cope with a spectrum of major life events. As such, parenting is the most important potentially modifiable target of preventive intervention. The Power of Positive Parenting provides an in-depth description of "Triple P," one of the most extensively studied parenting programs in the world, backed by more than 30 years of ongoing research. Triple P has its origins in social learning theory and the principles of behavior, cognitive, and affective change, and its aim is to prevent severe behavioral, emotional, and developmental problems in children and adolescents by enhancing the knowledge, skills, and confidence of parents. Triple P incorporates five levels of intervention on a tiered continuum of increasing strength for parents of children from birth to age 16. The programs comprising the Triple P system are designed to create a family-friendly environment that better supports parents, with a range of programs tailored to their differing needs. This volume draws on the editors' experience of developing Triple P, and chapters address every aspect of the system, as well as how it can be applied to a diverse range of child and parent problems in different age groups and cultural contexts.

Is it possible to overcome the enduring problem of child maltreatment? In Eradicating Child Maltreatment, leading international figures in the field of child welfare address this enduring and thorny question, setting out a public health approach to prevention. It draws on groundbreaking research and practice on prevention and early intervention from around the globe spanning health, social care, education and criminal justice. Contributors describe what is known about the incidence of child maltreatment, how far we have succeeded in eradicating it, which preventative strategies have been proven to be effective, and offers evidenced recommendations for policy and practice. Aiming to draw us nearer to the goal of a world free from child maltreatment first articulated by the visionary paediatrician Dr. C. Henry Kempe in 1978, this important book provides new insights for professionals, managers, academics and policymakers across the range of child and family welfare services.

Across all cultures parenting is the foundation of family life. It is the domain where adult mental health meets infant development. Beginning in pregnancy, parenting involves many conscious and unconscious processes which have recently been shown to affect a child's development significantly. This book focuses on pregnancy and the first year of life, providing a thorough account of the points of encounter between adult and infant psychiatry. In a fresh and comprehensive way, it summarises knowledge about early parenting, including a critical analysis of parenting, what it means to be a "good enough parent", and its relationship to infant, parent and family outcomes. In addition to the psychiatric dimension, the book emphasises the biological aspects of parenting, parental psychopathology and normal and abnormal infant development. Praise for Parenting and Mental Health: “Tyano, Keren, Herrman and Cox have edited a thoughtfully prepared guide on normal and abnormal parenting. They have, with enormous skill and wisdom, helped to unite the important aspects of pregnancy, infant and childhood development and parenting for adult and child and adolescent psychiatrists. World-class internationally recognized clinicians and researchers help make this book useful throughout the world. This is a masterful, culturally sensitive and important book which provides a long overdue and much needed guide on relationships among children, parents and families.” —Michelle Riba, M.D., M.S., Professor and Associate Chair for Integrated Medical and Psychiatric Services, Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, USA “During recent decades, progress in the field of infant mental health has been revolutionary; at the same time, there has been rapid development in women’s mental health. By bringing these two together, this pioneering book leads its readers to the vital new focal point around perinatal mental health. The book integrates the origins of developmental psychiatry in attachment and systemic contexts and shows concretely how relationship experiences and biology interact when new life begins. After describing the fascinating world of early parenting, the book focuses on problems, difficulties and disorders during this phase of life and above all on how to support, intervene and treat disorders in parenting. When infants, mothers and fathers are understood in a holistic way, professionals in many fields will be able to promote the transmission of meaningful life through parenthood and parenting.” —Tuula Tamminen, Professor of Child Psychiatry, University of Tampere, Finland; Past-President of World Association for Infant Mental Health, President of European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Cover design by Reouth Keren