Kinship by Design


Book Description

What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans’ answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption’s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice. She goes on to trace Americans’ shifting ideas about matching children with physically or intellectually similar parents, revealing how research in developmental science and technology shaped adoption as it navigated the nature-nurture debate. Concluding with an insightful analysis of the revolution that ushered in special needs, transracial, and international adoptions, Kinship by Design ultimately situates the practice as both a different way to make a family and a universal story about love, loss, identity, and belonging. In doing so, this volume provides a new vantage point from which to view twentieth-century America, revealing as much about social welfare, statecraft, and science as it does about childhood, family, and private life.




Troubled Transplants


Book Description

Caring for troubled adoptive/foster care children can be both harrowing and heroic. Many of today's foster and adopted children come from backgrounds where they experience not only the loss of previous caregivers, but have also suffered from abuse, sexual exploitation, or neglect. Individuals who invite these children into their homes often find themselves in a therapeutic role that can tax and exhaust. Troubled Transplants focuses on these children, their backgrounds, and their deleterious impact on the interaction and environment with the foster or adoptive family. The authors provide suggestions about behavioral roots and practical strategies to address and improve these issues.




Special Needs Adoptions


Book Description

With the new federal mandate to double, by the year 2002, the number of children in foster care who are to be adopted or placed in permanent legal guardianships, it is essential for adoption agency staff and prospective families to learn which factors contribute to successful and unsuccessful placements. Dr. Ruth McRoy's informative guide, Special Needs Adoptions: Practice Issues outlines what formulates a successful match between adoptable children with special needs and their prospective parents, and how the current placements can be improved. Dr. McRoy recognizes the challenges of building families through adoptions and offers specific training suggestions for special needs adoptive families and agency workers in order to improve adoption outcomes for children. The book is based on a research project designed to identify special needs adoptions practice issues that contributed to intact, disruptive and dissolved adoptions by collecting data from adoption supervisors, post-adoption service providers, and actual case records of adoption placements. Based on the findings, the characteristics of children needing adoptive placement are described, practice issues such as matching children and parents are addressed, and transition planning is discussed. Further, controversial placement issues including foster parent adoptions, single parent adoptions, sibling placement and transracial adoptions are dealt with. Special Needs Adoptions is a rich, resourceful guide for all of the parties involved in a special need adoption: state and private adoption agency staff, post-adoption service providers, child welfare policy makers and researchers. Special Needs Adoptions is also a wonderful resource for adoptive parents or prospective parents considering special needs adoptions.




Foster Care, Problems and Issues


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Foster Care : Problems and Issues


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Regents' Proceedings


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The Effects of Early Social-Emotional and Relationship Experience on the Development of Young Orphanage Children


Book Description

Undertaken at orphanages in Russia, this study tests the role of early social and emotion experience in the development of children. Children were exposed to either multiple caregivers who performed routine duties in a perfunctory manner with minimal interaction or fewer caregivers who were trained to engage in warm, responsive, and developmentally appropriate interactions during routine care. Engaged and responsive caregivers were associated with substantial improvements in child development and these findings provide a rationale for making similar improvements in other institutions, programs, and organizations.




Behavioral, Social, and Emotional Assessment of Children and Adolescents


Book Description

Behavioral, Social, and Emotional Assessment of Children and Adolescents, Second Edition was written to provide a comprehensive foundation for conducting clinical assessment of child and adolescent social-emotional behavior in a practical, scientific, and culturally appropriate manner. It is divided into two major sections. Part I includes eight chapters that provide a general foundation for assessment practice. These chapters include coverage of basic professional and ethical issues, classification and diagnostic problems, and six primary assessment methods, which are presented in detail. Part II includes six chapters on applications for assessing specific social-emotional behavior domains, including internalizing and externalizing problems, social skills and peer relations, young children, and diverse cultural groups. Together, these two sections provide a framework for a model of assessment that is practical, flexible, sensitive to specific needs, and empirically sound. Changes in the second edition of this book include: increased coverage of the practice of functional behavior assessment; updated test reviews; reviews of new assessment instruments; updated information on legal and ethical issues; updated information on assessment and cultural diversity; and a handy appendix with contact information for all publishers of instruments discussed in the book, including Web site addresses. To the greatest extent possible, this book weaves together the most recent research evidence and common application issues. It is specifically relevant to practitioners and researchers in the fields of school psychology and child clinical psychology, but will also be of interest to those in related disciplines, such as counseling, social work, child psychiatry, and special education.