More creative interventions for troubled children and youth
by Linda Lowenstein

Book description:
Liana Lowenstein's exciting new book presents more creative interventions to engage, assess, and treat children, youth, and families. Games, art, music, role-plays, and stories are used to help reach resistant clients and enable them to identify and express feelings, manage anger, develop social skills, and enhance self-esteem. This book also includes a special section on managing challenging client behavior. More Creative Interventions is an essential resource for practitioners seeking to add new and innovative counseling activities to their repertory.

The primal teen: What the new discoveries about the teenage brain tell us about our kids
By Barbara Strauch

Book reviews:
Strauch, medical science and health editor at the New York Times, sets out to offer reassurance to parents baffled by their kids' seemingly irrational and erratic behavior. She discusses the latest research, including brain scans that show changes in the brain's structure and function that could explain the crazy behavior exhibited by teens. In addition to reviewing various research projects around the country, Strauch also includes discussions with both parents and teenagers. Parents lament their inability to understand why a straight-A student suddenly loses interest in school or starts behaving miserably. The teens are surprisingly open about their often ill-advised behavior, but seem unable to offer reasons for such actions. One possible explanation, still debated by scientists, is whether adolescence is a critical brain period, that is, an important period of development. Particularly interesting is the chapter Crazy by Design, in which Strauch offers evidence of the cognitive and emotional development of teens. Just as there are growth spurts for babies and young children, there are developmental milestones for teens roughly ages 11, 15 and 19. For example, While a younger teen might see a parent as a hypocrite if he holds two opposing views, an older teenager would begin to understand how two things can be true at the same time, and weigh the evidence for each. While the book does not offer how-to guidance, readers will be struck by the wonderfully candid comments by those interviewed as well as Strauch's insightful narrative.

INTERVENTION

Schoolgirls: Young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap
By Peggy Orenstein

Book description:
Troubled by the 1990 American Association of University Women report on the loss of self-esteem by American girls between the ages of nine and 15, journalist Orenstein sought the human stories behind the statistics. She worked for a year with girls from two California schools, interviewing students, their families, teachers, and the administrators of the two schools. She also observed classes, school ground behavior, and home life. Not aiming for an academic study, Orenstein places information from various studies in footnotes to the children's narratives. Her text focuses instead on situations ranging from subtle but definite discouragement of female students to a blatant devaluing of all students. Although there were other factors involved, she concentrates on the stories from school in describing the wrenching and all-too-typical conditions many girls face. Recommended for public libraries, high school libraries, and academic libraries with women's studies or education collections

Group work with adolescents: Principles and practice
By Andrew Malekoff

Book description:
Andrew Malekoff has done an exceptional thing: he has written a book on group work with adolescents which presents a solid overview of the developmental stage of adolescence. matched with sound group theory and group practice principles... In large part due to Malekoff's exceptional talent with language, this book is as easy to read as a work of fiction. It carries the reader along in the same fashion as a really good mystery story. When he writes with evident concern and compassion for the young people he works with, we are engaged with their stories, too, and can hardly wait to see "how it turns out." He makes us care about the adolescents whose lives are overburdened with forces that pull them and push them in a hundred directions at once. His command of knowledge about the developmental tasks of adolescence leads him to write masterfully of the challenges and struggles, the achievements and victories of the age-stage. His understanding of the youths' surrounding environment – which is far too often, neither nurturing nor sustaining – helps him complete the picture of the adolescent in context. With all that, Malekoff includes poetry, much of his own. This creative addition brings the fragility and vulnerability of the young people to life in a way that a purely narrative style could not convey... The theory/ies of group functioning, group dynamics, group social processes are demonstrated both in text and in practice illustrations. Malekoff apparently subscribes to more than one explanatory frame and this makes the demonstrated practice all the richer and fuller and, even, elegant. This book gives us a picture of what mastery looks like... The book is scholarly without being pedantic; comprehensive without being exhausting; well organized without being linear. The book is remarkable and I recommend it without reservation to students, agency workers, social work educators, field instructors, and, perhaps, even, to adolescents themselves. With it, they may be exposed to the work and the being of an adult who is deeply committed to them and to their future

Support groups for children
By Kathleen O'Rourke and John C. Worzbyt