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.

Throughout the world, politicians are dismantling state enterprises and heaping praise on private markets, while in the United States a new rhetoric of "citizen empowerment" links a widespread distrust of government to decentralization and privatization. Here Joel Handler asks whether this restructuring of authority really allows ordinary citizens to take more control of the things that matter in their roles as parents and children, teachers and students, tenants and owners, producers and consumers. Looking at citizens as stakeholders in the modern social welfare state created by the New Deal, he traces the surprising ideological shifts of empowerment from its beginning as a cornerstone of the war on poverty in the 1960s to its central place in conservative market-based voucher schemes for school reform in the 1990s. Handler shows that in the past the gains from decentralization have proved to be more symbol than substance: some disadvantaged members of society will find new opportunities in the changes of the 1990s, but others will simply experience powerlessness under another name. He carefully distinguishes "empowerment by invitation" (in special education, worker safety, home health care, public housing tenancy, and neighborhood organizations) from the "empowerment by conflict" exemplified by the radical decentralization of the Chicago public schools. What emerges is a map of the major pitfalls and possible successes in the current journey away from a discredited regulatory state.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book portrays men’s experiences of home alone leave and how it affects their lives and family gender roles in different policy contexts and explores how this unique parental leave design is implemented in these contrasting policy regimes. The book brings together three major theoretical strands: social policy, in particular the literature on comparative leave policy developments; family and gender studies, in particular the analysis of gendered divisions of work and care and recent shifts in parenting and work-family balance; critical studies of men and masculinities, with a specific focus on fathers and fathering in contemporary western societies and life-courses. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with fathers across eleven countries, the book shows that the experiences and social processes associated with fathers’ home alone leave involve a diversity of trends, revealing both innovations and absence of change, including pluralization as well as the constraining influence of policy, gender, and social context. As a theoretical and empirical book it raises important issues on modernization of the life course and the family in contemporary societies. The book will be of particular interest to scholars in comparing western societies and welfare states as well as to scholars seeking to understand changing work-life policies and family life in societies with different social and historical pathways.

Counseling Criminal Justice Offenders, Second Edition takes a practical view of offenders, their problems, and the difficulties counselors face working with them in criminal justice settings. Author Ruth E. Masters examines criminal justice counseling on an individual and group basis and in a variety of settings such as prisons, probation and parole agencies, diversion programs, group homes, halfway houses, prerelease facilities, and U.S. jails. The book also explores the many faces of offenders — young, old, male, female, and across many cultures. The Second Edition of Counseling Criminal Justice Offenders recognizes that individuals who counsel offenders in the criminal justice system often have not had the extensive training of a licensed psychologist and this text is designed to provide readers with an understanding of the counseling process. The book explores practical knowledge of legal principles, appropriate and effective counselor attitudes, and the past and present protocols of American corrections. Primarily designed for criminal justice students taking correctional counseling courses, Counseling Criminal Justice Offenders, Second Edition is also a vital resource for any Criminal Justice, Social Work, Psychology, or Counseling practitioner interfacing with offenders.

First published in 1998. The GARF Assessment Sourcebook is a comprehensive guide to the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning (GARF) scale for family assessment. This comprehensive guide to the GARF is an essential tool for practicing professionals as well as students in training programs. It provides a thorough description of each element of the GARF, a comprehensive review of the GARF in relation to other marriage and family assessment tools, summaries of GARF research, and a comprehensive appendix of reproducible GARF-related forms. The GARF Assessment Sourcebook challenges marriage and family therapists to use, evaluate, and refine the GARF so that it may be included in the main portion of the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). As managed care becomes more pervasive and providers start giving more direction over treatment options, the GARF will become an important new tool in family mental health treatment to assist clinicians who are struggling to improve services and justify their work to the broader health-care community.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From a leading child psychologist comes this groundbreaking new understanding of children’s behavior, offering insight and strategies to support both parents and children. Nominated for Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel H. Pink's Next Big Idea Club Over her decades as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Mona Delahooke has routinely counseled distraught parents who struggle to manage their children’s challenging, sometimes oppositional behaviors. These families are understandably focused on correcting or improving a child’s lack of compliance, emotional outbursts, tantrums, and other “out of control” behavior. But, as she has shared with these families, a perspective shift is needed. Behavior, no matter how challenging, is not the problem but a symptom; a clue about what is happening in a child’s unique physiologic makeup. In Brain-Body Parenting, Dr. Delahooke offers a radical new approach to parenting based on her clinical experience as well as the most recent research in neuroscience and child psychology. Instead of a “top-down” approach to behavior that focuses on the thinking brain, she calls for a “bottom-up” approach that considers the essential role of the entire nervous system, which produces children’s feelings and behaviors. When we begin to understand the biology beneath the behavior, suggests Dr. Delahooke, we give our children the resources they need to grow and thrive—and we give ourselves the gift of a happier, more connected relationship with them. Brain-Body Parenting empowers parents with tools to help their children develop self-regulation skills while also encouraging parental self-care, which is crucial for parents to have the capacity to provide the essential “co-regulation” children need. When parents shift from trying to secure compliance to supporting connection and balance in the body and mind, they unlock a deeper understanding of their child, encouraging calmer behavior, more harmonious family dynamics, and increased resilience.