Now more than ever there is a need to ensure that best practices are being used in residential programs. As the focus on costs and outcomes increase, residential programs must clearly demonstrate that the interventions provided are efficient and effective. Readers will learn how to: Create strength-based, empowering and healing environments; Better engage and partner with children, adolescents and families, in meaningful ways; Support those who have experienced trauma and loss, and to prevent and eliminate the use of restraint and seclusion; Respect and include cultural indices in practices; Train, mentor, supervise, support and empower staff about how to deliver promising and best practices, and evidence-informed and evidence-based interventions; and Track long-term outcomes, and create funding strategies to better support sustained positive outcomes. This book encourages readers to think strategically about how agencies, communities and systems can identify and implement actions that lead to positive change and how to work more collaboratively to improve the lives of children and adolescents who have experienced emotional and behavioral life challenges and their families.

Transforming Residential Interventions: Practical Strategies and Future Directions captures the emerging changes, exciting innovations, and creative policies and practices informing ground-breaking residential programs. Building on the successful 2014 publication Residential Interventions for Children, Adolescents, and Families, this follow-up volume provides a contemporary framework to address the needs of young people and their families, alongside practical strategies that can be implemented at the program, community, system, and policy levels. Using the Building Bridges Initiative as a foundation, the book serves as a "how-to manual" for making bold changes to residential interventions. The reader will learn from a range of inspired leaders who, rather than riding the wave of change, jumped in and created the wave by truly listening to and partnering with their youth, families, advocates, and staff. Chapters provide real-time practice examples and specific strategies that are transformational and consider critical areas, such as family and youth voice, choice and roles, partnerships, permanency and equity, diversity, and inclusion. These methods benefit youth with behavioral and/or emotional challenges and their families and will improve an organization’s long-term outcomes and fiscal bottom line. This book is for oversight agencies, managed care companies, providers of service, advocates, and youth/family leaders looking for an exemplar guide to the new frontier of residential intervention. In this era of accountability and measurement, it will become a trusted companion in leading residential interventions to improved practices and outcomes.

Now more than ever there is a need to ensure that best practices are being used in residential programs. As the focus on costs and outcomes increase, residential programs must clearly demonstrate that the interventions provided are efficient and effective. Readers will learn how to: Create strength-based, empowering and healing environments; Better engage and partner with children, adolescents and families, in meaningful ways; Support those who have experienced trauma and loss, and to prevent and eliminate the use of restraint and seclusion; Respect and include cultural indices in practices; Train, mentor, supervise, support and empower staff about how to deliver promising and best practices, and evidence-informed and evidence-based interventions; and Track long-term outcomes, and create funding strategies to better support sustained positive outcomes. This book encourages readers to think strategically about how agencies, communities and systems can identify and implement actions that lead to positive change and how to work more collaboratively to improve the lives of children and adolescents who have experienced emotional and behavioral life challenges and their families.

Children and young people in care who have been traumatized need a therapeutic environment where they can heal and which meets their emotional and developmental needs. This book provides a model of care for traumatized children and young people, based on theory and practice experience pioneered at the Lighthouse Foundation, Australia. The authors explain the impact of trauma on child development, drawing on psychodynamic, attachment and neurobiological trauma theories. The practical aspects of undertaking therapeutic care are then outlined, covering everything from forming therapeutic relationships to the importance of the home environment and daily routines. The book considers the totality of the child's experience at the individual, group, organization and community levels and argues that attention to all of these is essential if the child is to achieve wellness. Case material from both children and carers are used throughout to illustrate both the impact of trauma and how children have been helped to recovery through therapeutic care. This book will provide anyone caring for traumatized children and young people in a residential setting with both the understanding and the practical knowledge to help children recover. It will be essential reading for managers and decision-makers responsible for looked after children, child care workers such as residential and foster carers, youth workers, social workers, mental health workers and child welfare academics.

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.

Therapeutic Residential Care For Children and Youth takes a fresh look at therapeutic residential care as a powerful intervention in working with the most troubled children who need intensive support. Featuring contributions from distinguished international contributors, it critically examines current research and innovative practice and addresses the key questions: how does it work, what are its critical “active ingredients” and does it represent value for money? The book covers a broad spectrum of established and emerging approaches pioneered around with world, with contributors from the USA, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, Australia, Israel and the UK offering a mix of practice and research exemplars. The book also looks at the research relating to critical issues for child welfare service providers: the best time to refer children to residential care, how children can be helped to make the transition into care, the characteristics of children entering and exiting care, strategies for engaging families as partners, how the substantial cost of providing intensive is best measured against outcomes, and what research and development challenges will allow therapeutic residential care to be rigorously compared with its evidence-based community-centered alternatives. Importantly, the volume also outlines how to set up and implement intensive child welfare services, considering how transferable they are, how to measure success and value for money, and the training protocols and staffing needed to ensure that a programme is effective. This comprehensive volume will enable child welfare professionals, researchers and policymakers to develop a refined understanding of the potential of therapeutic residential care, and to identify the highest and best uses of this intensive and specialized intervention.

This comprehensive volume reviews current knowledge about multiple problem behaviors in adolescence, focusing on "what works" in prevention and treatment. Cutting-edge research is presented on the epidemiology, development, and social costs of four youth problems that frequently co-occur: serious antisocial behavior, drug and alcohol misuse, tobacco smoking, and risky sexual behavior. A framework for reducing these behaviors is outlined, drawing on both clinical and public health perspectives, and empirically supported prevention and treatment programs are identified. Also addressed are ways to promote the development, dissemination, and effective implementation of research-based intervention practices. Authored by an interdisciplinary panel of experts, this is a state-of-the-science sourcebook and text for anyone working with or studying adolescents at risk.