Working With Children and Youth With Complex Needs: 20 Skills to Build Resilience

"Working With Children and Youth with Complex Needs provides detailed description of techniques and rich stories of how mental health professionals can help young people become more resilient. With ample case studies and fascinating explanations of research, Dr. Ungar shows why we need to work just as hard at changing the environments that surround children as we do trying to change children themselves. Examples drawn from work in clinical, community and residential settings help show that the best way to make individually focused interventions effective and socially just is to address the social ecological factors that influence many aspects of children's development. Working with children's extended family, addressing issues of community violence, racism and homophobia, helping parents and teachers understand children's maladaptive coping strategies as sometimes necessary survival strategies, participating in interagency case conferences as case managers, and even advocating for better services with funders are among the dozens of ways clinicians can expand the potentially therapeutic value of their interventions and improve treatment outcomes. The 20 microskills that are shared provide techniques that clinicians can use in any setting to make their practices more ecologically focused and resilience promoting"--