Working with Adolescents A Guide for Practitioners

This state-of-the-art practitioner resource and course text provides a comprehensive view of adolescent development and spells out effective ways to help teens who are having difficulties. The book illuminates protective and risk factors in the many contexts of adolescents' lives, from individual attributes to family, school, neighborhood, and media influences. An ecological perspective is applied to understanding and addressing specific adolescent challenges, including substance abuse, sexual identity issues, mental health problems, risky sexual behavior, and delinquency. Throughout the text, clear-cut assessment and intervention strategies are illustrated with rich case examples. This book will be important for practitioners and students in social work, clinical child/adolescent and school psychology, psychiatry, family therapy, counseling, and nursing. It will also serve as a text in undergraduate- and graduate-level courses such as social work practice with adolescents, human behavior and the social environment, human development, and adolescent counseling and psychotherapy, and in psychiatric residency programs.

Julie Anne Laser, PhD, MSW, LCSW, is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, where she coordinates the high-risk youth track of the MSW curriculum as well as teaches in the clinical and research series. Dr. Laser\u2019s research focus is on adolescent resiliency, particularly the relevance of specific ecological and internal protective and risk factors by culture and gender. She recently completed large studies of resilience in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Senegalese youth and homeless teens in the United States. Projects are under way to evaluate resilience in Latin American youth. Dr. Laser has more than 20 years of clinical social work experience and has worked in Mexico, Switzerland, Japan, and China, as well as a variety of urban and rural settings in the United States. She is particularly interested in school social work. Nicole Nicotera, PhD, MSW, LICSW, is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, where she teaches clinical practice theories and skills and a doctoral research course in qualitative analysis. Dr. Nicotera\u2019s research and scholarship focus on measuring civic development in children, interventions to enhance civic leadership and positive youth development, the influences of neighborhood collective socialization and social cohesion on young people, and issues of unearned privilege and oppression in social work practice, education, and research. Her recent research with young people in public housing neighborhoods examines civic engagement and the capacity of youth to act as agents of neighborhood change. As a clinical social worker, Dr. Nicotera worked with children, youth, and families in a community mental health center, where she used art, play, and sand-tray therapies, as well as other intervention modalities. She also has extensive school social work experience with seriously emotionally and behaviorally challenged children.

Foreword, Jeffrey M. Jenson I. Theoretical Framework 1. Challenges in Clinical Work with Adolescents: An Overview 2. The Push–Pull of Adolescent Development 3. Resilience in Adolescence II. The Adolescent in Context 4. Internal Assets and Individual Attributes Associated with Healthy Adolescent Outcomes, Tom Luster 5. The Family Environment, Douglas Davies 6. The School Environment 7. The Neighborhood Environment 8. Media Influences 9. Assessment and Intervention at Each Ecological Level: A Case Illustration, Julie Anne Laser, Nicole Nicotera, Tom Luster and Douglas Davies III. Clinical Interventions for Problematic Adolescent Behavior 10. Substance Abuse, Julie Anne Laser, George Stuart Leibowitz, and Nicole Nicotera 11. Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Development 12. Mental Health Issues: Depressive Symptoms, Personality Disorders, Suicidal Behavior, and Self-Injurious Behavior 13. Sexual Behaviors, Sexually Transmitted Diseases including HIV/AIDS, and Pregnancy, Julie Anne Laser, Nicole Nicotera, and Shannon Sainer 14. Delinquency, Julie Anne Laser, George Stuart Leibowitz, and Nicole Nicotera 15. The Joys of Working with Adolescents