Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth

A Strengths and Well-Being Model

Lonnie R. Helton, Mieko Kotake Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317788386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Use a strengths perspective for working with your younger clients! Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model presents new insights into successfully working with children by concentrating on their capabilities and resilience. This book explores the continuum of children's needs and challenges from early childhood through adolescence. This text also supports child-centered and strengths-oriented approaches to intervention with children and introduces specific strategies for maximizing pro-social behaviors, self-concept, learning, and positive peer relationships in children at home, at school, and in the community. Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth shows how children's rights have slowly evolved over many years, from children's status as property in the 1600s to the twentieth-century innovations that give a child a specific legal status with a certain amount of freedom and self-determination. By emphasizing the self-concept and self-esteem guidelines outlined by this book, social workers, mental health specialists, and childcare professionals can help children transition into healthy adults, despite hardships, disabilities, or parent negligence. Chapters highlighting interview and assessment techniques as well as media-directed, creative child therapies will enhance your counseling and intervention practices. Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth provides you with insight on:

• the relationships between children and family environment—from two-parent families to foster families
• child socialization and peer relationships—in school and around the community
• adolescence—gender roles, ethnic and racial diversity, sexual orientation, and adult transitioning
• educational needs—teacher expectations, special education, diversity, home schooling
• and more!

The strengths perspective is not always included in traditional child welfare and children's practice texts, and this textbook fills that gap for working with younger clients. Children in child welfare, educational, mental health, family service, and recreational settings will all benefit from the inclusion of Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model in your work. Augmented with case scenarios and studies, empirical findings, and questions for discussion in every chapter, this book will help child service professionals as well as university faculty and students.

Chapter 1

The Strengths and Resilience of Children

There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing when we save our children, we save ourselves.

Margaret Mead

Child welfare and other human service professionals have traditionally viewed children in terms of their problems and liabilities rather than from a perspective that focuses on their strengths. Children have every right to be engaged, evaluated, and offered assistance in a manner that will enable them to become aware of and maximize their potential. The perspective presented here is an effort to accentuate the strengths and competencies of children that lead them to be resilient. Despite incredible hardship, many children are not only able to overcome these barriers but also achieve successful development and a quality of life comparable to those who have not faced such difficulties.

In this book, the authors refer generally to children as any individual from birth up to the age of twenty-one. However, when adolescents are being referred to as such, they will be called adolescents, and will include children ages twelve through twenty.

The Strengths Perspective

The strengths perspective emphasizes children’s assets, capabilities, and attributes, as well as their adaptive abilities. Children’s capabilities often are perceived marginally, if at all, when they are placed in foster care or residential settings. Historically, this viewpoint is consistent with the problem-focused nature of intervention with children, which centers upon dependency, family dysfunction, and abuse and neglect. Andrews and Ben-Arieh (1999) state that the body of knowledge about children’s problems and threats to their survival far surpasses known information about children’s strengths, satisfaction, and realization of opportunities. Furthermore, they offer two critical factors that must be considered in developing quality-of-life factors: (1) focus on the child as the unit of observation and (2) consider the child’s perspective (Andrews and Ben-Arieh, 1999, p. 109). Moreover, Cummins (1996) reviewed twenty-seven well-being studies and identified seven domains of well-being: material well-being; health; safety; productive activity (e.g., employment, work, and schooling); place in the community (e.g., socioeconomic status, community involvement, self-esteem, and empowerment); intimacy; and emotional well-being (e.g., mental health, morale, and spiritual well-being).

Moreover, since the 1960s researchers interested in social indicators and quality-of-life measurement have addressed the well-being of children and youth in an effort to assist child advocacy groups, policymakers, other child and family researchers, the media, and service providers. This body of research has been especially useful since programming for children and adolescents has moved from institutionalization to family- and community-focused services. This research explores the condition of children, the monitoring and tracking of child outcomes, and the setting of goals (Land, Lamb, and Mustillo, 2001).

The strengths perspective suggests that children possess promising qualities for healthy development and should not be seen as victims of circumstance. The strengths perspective leads to intervention emphasizing individuals’ capacities, talents, competencies, visions, and hopes (Saleebey, 1996). Kaplan and Girard (1994) state that people are more likely to change when their strengths are supported. Other undergirding tenets of the strengths perspective include empowerment, resilience, and membership. DeJong and Miller (1995) state that the assumptions underlying the strengths perspective are grounded in the belief that social workers must increasingly respect and utilize clients’ ways of viewing themselves and their worlds in the process of intervention. Rapp (1998) suggests that the strengths perspective helps to elucidate and bring forth the hope that individuals have for success in their lives. Interventions founded on strengths will assist persons in building their willpower so that they can become engaged in step-by-step plans for achieving their goals. Saleebey (2002) believes that a number of practice trends in the helping professions subscribe to the strengths perspective and include developmental resilience, healing and wellness, solution-focused therapy, assets-based community development, and narrative and story. In such practice models children are encouraged to take pride in their positive traits and accomplishments. For example, children in a new foster home or school must be helped to maximize their strong personal assets, and adults must be forever mindful to reinforce children’s resilience in coping within harsh environmental conditions.

Children’s service workers and counselors are increasingly changing traditional assessment protocols and have begun to focus more on the child’s and family’s strengths. This process has proven to be a major shift in thinking about and planning for children with multiple needs and challenges. However, many workers feel compelled to address at-risk aspects of children in their assessment. Graybeal (2001) notes that social workers are mandated to complete structured assessment forms that inevitably lead to problem lists, pathology, and psychiatric diagnoses; agency forms are more likely than not dictated by agency policy and insurance (e.g., managed care) guidelines. Thus, children are often uprooted from their family environment and placed in what would appear to be a safe and appropriate setting before a thorough evaluation may be completed. However, the placement that is best suited for the child might actually hinge on a comprehensive assessment of such variables as unique learning styles and exceptional talents which might be best addressed in particular settings. The person-in-environment (PIE) assessment, developed by Karls and Wandrei (1994), shows much promise for evaluating children and youth placed as it assesses their issues within a broader framework of social problems and challenges.

Saleebey (1996) points out that practice which integrates a strengths perspective invariably takes into account the client’s cultural and personal stories, narratives, and even folklore. This approach is a natural direction for children, who generally respond openly to stories and share their own life experiences through storytelling. For example, some African-American clients bring many strengths and assets to the counseling process that have resulted from their struggle against racism and discrimination (Westbrooks and Stark, 2001). Many children also respond to bibliotherapy (the therapeutic use of books) and joint storytelling with the therapist to share more openly their thoughts, feelings, and expectations.

In addition, the strengths perspective addresses the diversity of children’s living environments, which may range from single-parent families to trigenerational kinship arrangements. Step- and blended families, which have been frequently scrutinized in the past for not meeting children’s needs, are now recognized for their strong and nurturing qualities. Joint custody and shared living arrangements have afforded divorced parents opportunities to be with their children throughout their growth and development into adulthood. With a strengths perspective, children’s counselors help children expand their self-awareness and enhance self-esteem by jointly coconstructing positive stories about family and peer relationships.

Human service professionals are frequently impressed that many children from deprived and abusive backgrounds develop into healthy individuals. Something in their personality enables them to cope against the odds and overcome extreme obstacles. This is the core of resiliency. According to Benard (1997), children who are resilient tend to view life more positively, are able to laugh at themselves, and find alternative ways of looking at things. And this resilience would seem to stem from the natural openness and responsiveness that are indigenous to being a child. Moreover, Benard (1997) describes resilient children as possessing the following characteristics: social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and a sense of purpose and future. Saleebey (2002) emphasizes the presumption that all individuals have untapped reserves of capacity, energy, courage, fortitude, and integrity, as well as other assets. The strengths perspective perceives the client as the true expert on his or her situation, which often places the professional in the role of a facilitator or consultant (Sheafor, Horejsi, and Horejsi, 2000). Weick et al. (1989) affirm that although the professional acknowledges limitations, a conscious effort is made to accentuate gains aleady made, and they go on to state, “the question is not what kind of life one has had, but what kind of life one wants” (p. 353). With children, helping professionals must listen carefully to the child’s language, self-perception, and feelings about his or her future in every counseling session and team planning conference.

Along this line, Petr (1998) states that children have little power in the world and maintains that adults are the authority figures over children in both families and social agencies. He refers to a concept known as adultcentrism, which is founded on the idea of shaping or molding children to fit adult prototypes and patterns of socialization. Stage theorists such as Freud, Erikson, and Piaget view children as incomplete persons who are on their way to becoming adults. Petr (1998) notes that if all goes well, children move through these stages and become well-socialized, acculturated adults. Children are viewed from this mind-set as being dependent, amoral, egocentric, illiterate, irrational, emotionally unstable, unproductive, and present oriented. On the contrary, adults are perceived as independent, moral, sociocentric, literate, rational, emotionally stable, productive, and future oriented. Petr (1998) also proposes four principles to combat adult-centrism in delivering services to children:

(1) Take time to learn and value children as children; (2) Routinely conduct individual interviews with children; (3) Involve child as fully as possible in decisions that affect the child’s life; (4) Support changes in social work research and education. (p. 21)

This intervention model will go far in empowering children to have a role and a say in what happens to them within the context of children’s services.

The literature on the resilience of children is growing rapidly, and it has begun to question and inevitably conjecture whether children are born with certain characteristics that lead to resilience or whether they may be taught skills of resilience. Resiliency has been alluded to as the factors and processes that bring about successful adjustment and adaptation in the face of challenging and threatening circumstances (Garmenzy and Mastern, 1991; Werner, 1993). Resilient children seem to transcend severely neglectful and abusive environments to become successful adults. Resilience, it would seem, stems from both personal characteristics and environmental conditions. The personal capabilities of resilient children include but are not limited to strong intellectual ability, a positive attitude toward others, physical attractiveness, enthusiasm, and an internal locus of control (Downs et al., 2000). Moreover, resiliency in children is attributed to external factors such as the support and expressed interest of individuals outside of the abusive family and the parents’ expectations of academic achievement and provision of at least a sporadically stable home environment (Smith and Carlson, 1997).

Research indicates that fathers play a critical role in helping adolescents become resilient (Zimmerman, Salem, and Notaro, 2000). In a Midwestern study of 850 ninth-grade adolescents over a three-year period, Zimmerman, Salem, and Notaro (2000) examined three measures of problem behavior: polydrug use, delinquency, and violent behavior. The ethnic and racial breakdown of the subjects follow: 80 percent African American, 17 percent white, and 3 percent mixed (white and African American). Father involvement was determined by scales measuring the average amount of time spent together, social support, and school support. Findings suggest that the involvement of fathers plays a vital role in helping adolescents eschew problem behavior. The researchers noted as well that the findings were the same when only African Americans were included.

The Strengths of Children

The strengths of children, essential for their healthy development and successful transition to adulthood, can be understood relative to challenges they face. Without those challenges, the strengths of children might not be evident. The emerging resiliency literature has made significant contributions to understanding a broad range of conditions from poverty to such personal characteristics as temperament and cognitive functioning, social relationships, and community resources contributing to healthy adaptation in the face of adversity (Windle, 1999). Resiliency is the essence of strength.

Studies have found that resiliency is associated with various outcomes among children. Those outcomes include academic performance (Noam, Pucci, and Foster, 1999; Walsh and Betz, 1990; Murry and Brody, 1999), drug and alcohol addiction (Noam, Pucci, and Foster, 1999), self-esteem or sense of self-worth (Markstrom, Marshall, and Tryon, 2000; Turner, 2000), physical health (Markstrom, Marshall, and Tryon, 2000), coping and adaptation (McCubbin et al., 1998; Cowen et al., 1990; Norman, 2000), psychopathology (Masten, Best, and Garmezy, 1990), and antisocial behavior (Garmezy, 1985).

Defining Resiliency

Researchers offer several definitions of resiliency. Markstrom, Marshall, and Tryon, (2000) define resiliency as “an adaptive, stress resistant personal quality that allows an individual to thrive despite unfortunate life experiences” (p. 693). According to Norman (2000), it is simply “the ability to bounce back from, or to successfully adapt to, adverse conditions” (p. 3). Another definition provided by Noam, Pucci, and Foster (1999) is “the ability to overcome adverse circumstances and thrive amidst an array of challenges, rather than any specific behaviors, which allow them to successfully navigate the complex environments many confront every day and to make productive realistic life choices” (p. 61). These definitions focus on one’s competence in making productive choices when one is surrounded by adverse conditions. Thus, resiliency works as a personal resource for navigating the environmental elements to produce positive outcomes. If one lacks resiliency, one has few resources to call on for overcoming such adverse elements as the divorce of one’s parents or pressure from peers. In other words, one musters one’s resilience to move forward despite the surrounding adversity.

Luthar and Cushing (1999) present risk and competence as the two key constructs that are pivotal components embedded in the construct of resiliency. For example, African-American racial status would be more strongly associated with resiliency than would white racial status. As a minority status poses greater risk due to stress caused by prejudice and discrimination, an African-American child with greater resiliency would be more competent in successfully surviving such risk (Markstrom, Marshall, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Authors
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. The Strengths and Resilience of Children
• Chapter 2. The Care of Children in American Society: Historical Events and Trends
• Chapter 3. Children and Family Relationships
• Chapter 4. Child Socialization and Peer Relationships
• Chapter 5. Children and Learning
• Chapter 6. Self-Concept and Self-Esteem
• Chapter 7. Adolescence
• Chapter 8. Child-Centered Practice Approaches: Emphasis on Strength and Resilience
• Chapter 9. Media-Directed, Creative Child Therapies
• Chapter 10. Evidence-Based Practice and Research for Promoting Children’s Strengths
• Chapter 11. Empowerment of Children in the Global Arena
• Epilogue
• Index