Turmoil to Turning Points: Building Hope for Children in Crisis Placements

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Overview

Speaking from the trenches, Richard Kagan offers hope to all those who want to help high-risk children and their families.

This book discusses principles and strategies that practitioners can use to guide their work. These include engaging parents of children in placement, mapping family resources, mobilizing networks, and creating safety plans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393702187
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1996
Series:	Norton Professional Books (Hardcover)
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

Rebecca, nine years old, is terrified of being sent home from a state-run hospital to the father who has repeatedly abused her sexually. Three-year-old Robbie was placed in a foster home after being sexually mutilated and brutally beaten, perhaps by his mother or her boyfriend. Through heartrending case histories, Kagan, a psychologist who works with family service agencies in the Albany, N.Y., area, offers a compelling, close-up look at troubled children and adolescents in families seemingly locked in a cycle of traumas and crises, torn by alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, drug addiction, severe neglect. Placements in residential treatment centers, foster homes or psychiatric hospitals, according to Kagan, can become turning points for positive change, if family members confront the psychodynamics, "double bind" messages and deep-seated wounds underlying a child's maladaptive behavior. His proposed reforms of the child welfare system center on a community-based approach that aims to provide continuity instead of moving the child from placement to placement. An eye-opening, hopeful report for social service practitioners and those who care about the crisis in child welfare. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Offers cases and advice from the trenches for those working with high- risk children and their families. Provides principles and strategies for working with parents and children, such as engaging parents in placement, mapping family resources, identifying split messages children hear, and creating safety plans. Suggests ways to improve the child and family services system, and how helping professionals can deal with a family's pain without becoming traumatized. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Kagan ("Families in Perpetual Crisis", 1989) shares his 20 years worth of experience in working with abused children and their families in a compassionate and thoughtful book. To reveal the various ways in which children can be helped and families held together, Kagan begins each of the first nine chapters with an accounting of a case he once worked and then offers analysis of the situations he found himself in. Readers will be simultaneously saddened and angered at what these children have gone through, such as the little girl hospitalized for possible mental problems who, Kagan discovers, has actually been sexually abused by her father. The final three chapters outline strategies and methods for making the child-services system work better--extremely necessary, given the significant failure present in the system. Valuable insight for the lay reader and practical advice for the advocate or child-services professional.

Brian McCombie