Early Intervention with Multi-Risk Families

Helping families who experience and live in environments with multiple risk factors-including poverty, domestic violence, teen parenthood, mental illness, and substance abuse-requires that professionals and paraprofessionals provide innovative, effective interventions. This much-needed book shows service providers how to use an integrative approach to understanding children and families, combining intervention techniques from a variety of programs, parenting strategies, and theoretical approaches. Professionals will learn how to engage parents if they are resistant to intervention and will discover specific, practical ways to help parents: become more self-reflective and empathetic toward their children, develop adaptive defenses and ways of dealing with stress, strengthen their sense of competence and social support, increase their parenting knowledge and develop positive perceptions of their children, deal with unresolved loss and trauma, enhance their interactions with their children, regulate their own emotions and those of their children, develop good planning and problem-solving skills.

Sarah Landy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and is an adjunct professor at York University Rosanne Menna, Ph.D., C.Psych., is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, Ontario