Through words, pictures, photographs, certificates and other 'little treasures', a Life Story Book provides a detailed account of the child's early history and a chronology of their life. Fully updated, this clear and concise book shows a unique family-friendly way to compile a Life Story Book which promotes a sense of permanency for the child, and encourages attachments within new families. Joy Rees' influential model works chronologically backwards rather than forwards, aiming to reinforce the child's sense of belonging and security before addressing the child's past and early trauma. The book contains simple explanations of complex concepts, practical examples, helpful suggestions and includes some simple checklists. This new edition has been expanded to include fostered children and those living in kinship care or with a special guardian. Perfect for social workers, adoption agencies, adoptive parents, foster carers and kinship carers, Life Story Books for Adopted and Fostered Children is a refreshing, innovative and common-sense guide.
Employing a range of innovative and creative ideas, this book is full of tips to engage children and promote their wellbeing. Children are vulnerable to low self-esteem, stress and anxiety because they are still growing and learning. This book looks at what we can do to minimise children's vulnerability to issues such as these, help them to build emotional resilience and teach them effective strategies for dealing with life's ups and downs. The book offers a host of different approaches that adults can use with children, including image-making, storytelling and puppetry. Chapters are brought to life with the voices of parents and professionals describing how these techniques worked for them. They also include guidance on how the principles can be used by professionals in the home, in schools or in therapeutic settings.
How can adoptive parents and their teenagers navigate the challenges of the adolescent years? Full of valuable, grounded advice, this guide will help parents to understand the impact of early trauma on a child's development and the specific nature of the changes that occur during adolescence. With tips for coping with common problems, it combines first-hand accounts from professionals, parents and teenagers themselves. It also covers essential topics such as: family and peer relationships, developing healthy intimate relationships, emerging identity issues, and contacting birth family. Accessible and honest, Parenting Adopted Teenagers is an invaluable resource for adoptive parents as well as professionals working with them.
Assessing risk is a key challenge in child protection work. Martin C. Calder presents a clear and accessible guide to understanding risk and the part it plays. This book considers what risk means and how risk assessments should be defined, it outlines the key challenges practitioners face day-to-day, and offers a helpful evidence-based assessment framework for use by frontline staff. Calder argues that risk now has to be reconceived as a multi-disciplinary activity which stretches beyond social work. As such, he highlights a need for a clearer shared terminology among professionals and encourages the social work profession to look to related disciplines, such as criminal justice, for ideas to improve practice. Demystifying the complex debates around risk and showing how to deliver effective risk assessment, this is an essential reference for social workers and social work students, as well as lecturers.
This fully updated and expanded third edition of a classic text provides a comprehensive introduction to key theory, knowledge, research and evidence relating to practice learning in social work and social care. It outlines the theories that underpin social care practice, the main assessment models and interventions, and also offers guidance on the effective implementation of assessment across a range of professional contexts. Contributors from research, policy-making and practice backgrounds offer guidance on how to apply policy and research findings in everyday practice while ensuring that the complex needs of each individual service user are met. This third edition also features new chapters on group work, social pedagogy and personalisation. The Handbook for Practice Learning in Social Work and Social Care is an essential resource for ensuring effective evidence-based practice which will be valued by students, educators and practitioners alike.
A valuable reference to help practising researchers not only to understand but also to apply innovative approaches to social work research. Featuring extended case studies of actual research projects, the book provides an overview of a number of central features and qualities of social work research. It incorporates both distinctive methodological features, such as approaches to participatory inquiry, and provides accounts of researcher strategies to address particular challenges, such as carrying out studies with hard to reach populations. This book combines important methodological insights with pragmatic guidance on commonly experienced problems and how these challenges can be overcome. This is a key resource for social work and social care students, social work practitioners and academics engaged in research.
Direct Work with Family Groups is full of great ideas to aid engagement, assessment and enable positive change through direct work with family groups. Working with families can be a challenging experience. This book looks at the personal skills needed to engage families, both at home and in the community. It provides guidance on how to assess and manage the needs of individual family members, whilst also being mindful of potential risk factors. With easy to use activities and resources, this book will inspire you to think about creative new ways to plan and carry out your work. Based on tried and tested techniques, this is a must-have for social workers and social work students, as well as child protection workers, therapists, counsellors and child and family centre workers. It is the perfect complement to Direct Work with Vulnerable Children, also by the same authors.
Identifying the most serious challenges faced in child protection work, this practical guide offers helpful solutions for frontline professionals working with children and adults. Informed by her many years on the frontline and subsequent experience writing serious case reviews, Joanna Nicolas has identified the most common pitfalls in child protection cases. The book focuses on understanding the impact of neglect, information sharing between professionals, communication with children, working with non-compliance/disguised compliance, and the impact of multiple risk factors. It offers tips for overcoming the challenges of everyday practice, such as home visits, as well as enhancing understanding of the key issues in this complex field. The evidence-informed chapters are packed with case examples and include useful reminders of the underlying principles at play. This is essential reading for social workers, health care workers, mental health workers, education professionals and related professions, such as housing and probation.
In this volume, the authors present an overview of the innovative work taking place in relation to domestic violence and child protection. This book looks at new prevention initiatives and how interventions for children exposed to domestic violence have been developed. It shows how services for abusive fathers have evolved and provides discussion and critique of a number of new initiatives in the field of interagency risk assessment. With international perspectives and examples drawn from social care, health care and voluntary sectors, this book brings together established ideas with recent thinking to provide an authoritative summary of current domestic violence and child protection practice. As a valuable source of guidance on how to work safely with children living with domestic violence, this is a key reference for social workers, health professionals and policy makers.
Counselling Skills for Working with Shame helps professionals to understand and identify shame and to build shame resilience in both the client and themselves. Shame is ubiquitous in counselling where there is an increased vulnerability and risk of exposure to shame. While many clients experience feelings of shame, it is often overlooked in the therapeutic process and as a result can be left untreated. It is particularly pertinent when working with clients who have experienced trauma, domestic or complex abuse, or who struggle with addiction, compulsion and sexual behaviours. Written in an accessible style, this is a hands-on, skills-based guide which helps practitioners to identify what elicits, evokes or triggers shame. It gives a general introduction to the nature of shame in both client and counsellor and how these become entwined in the therapeutic relationship. It focuses on increasing awareness of shame and how to release it in order to build shame resilience. With points for reflection, helpful exercises, top tips, reminders and suggestions for how to work with clients, this is a highly practical guide for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, nurses, social workers, educators, human resources, trainee counsellors and students.