Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth: A Strengths and Well-Being Model

Mental Health Practice with Children and Youth 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-centred and strengths-oriented approaches to intervention with children and introduces specific strategies for maximizing pro-social behaviours, 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 counselling and intervention practices. 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 academics and students.