Reading List
We would like to thank the San Mateo and Marin CASA programs for sharing their reading lists with us. Press the red button for a list of titles and descriptions in each category. Click it again to close. If you have a book you would like to share please email jbrown@californiacasa.org.
Categories:
ADOLESCENTS
A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of Adolescence
By Patricia Hersch
The "generation gap" of the 1960s has widened into a much deeper chasm in the 1990s, according to Hersch, former contributing editor to Psychology Today and the mother of three adolescents. This reflects no simple youthful rebellion but an extreme estrangement between adults and teenagers owing to the rise of dual careers, divorce, and violent social change...
Always Running
By: Luis Rodriguez
Rodriguez, an award-winning poet and publisher of the small press Tia Chucha, decided to document his youth as an East Los Angeles gang member in an effort to steer his teenaged son, Ramiro, away from the gang that he recently joined...
Cold New World: Growing up in a Harder Country
By: William Finnegan
From each community, Finnegan draws vivid portraits of individuals caught between a sense of despair that they can never achieve the good life and an almost utopian dream that they can somehow break through to the middle class. The struggle between gangs is probably the most arresting section of the book, but the level of grim insight throughout will disturb the optimism of a healthy economy supposedly reflected in Wall Street's rising numbers...
Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (but were afraid they'd ask)
By: Justin Richardson, MD & Mark Schuster MD,PhD
"Your kids' sexuality is bound to make you squeamish." No kidding. For parents whose tots are playing doctor in the garage and whose teens are pleading for coed sleep overs, here is some help. With wry humor as well as comments from folks who have been there, Richardson and Schuster combine experience in pediatrics and psychiatry to lend a frank helping hand (the emphasis is developmental and practical) by exploring not only the science and the time line of children's sexual development but also what is at stake when sex is up for discussion, whether the topic is abstinence, pleasure, feelings, responsibility, orientation, or STDs...
Getting Played
By: Jody Miller
Much has been written about the challenges that face urban African American young men, but less is said about the harsh realities for African American young women in disadvantaged communities. In Getting Played, sociologist Jody Miller presents a compelling picture of this dire social problem and explores how inextricably, and tragically, linked violence is to their daily lives in poor urban neighborhoods...
Hate List (young adult)
By:
Jennifer Brown
At the end of their junior year, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend pulls a gun in the Commons, leaving six students and a teacher dead and many others wounded. Valerie is hit by a bullet in the leg trying to stop him, just before he ends his own life. Until that point, Valerie had no idea that the "hate list" that she and Nick created would be used to target victims in a vengeful shooting spree...
Homeboys (young adult)
By: Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Sullen computer wiz Teddy sets out for revenge after gang bangers gun down his sister, Tina, in a drive-by shooting. After an up close encounter with the horrors of California's juvenile justice system in the wake of a failed first try, he's sentenced to a mentoring program for at-risk youth that forcibly hooks him up with hot but hard-nosed parole officer Mariana and wild, foulmouthed preteen Micah...
How to Live with Your Teenager
By: Peter Buntman
A Survivor's Handbook For Parents is an opportunity to share concerns, increase communication and improve understanding.
Lessons for Lifeguards: Working with Teens When the Topic is Hope
By: Michael Carrera
As a sexuality educator and university professor who has trained thousands of educators, Carrera has seen trends come and go in the field of pregnancy prevention - from shame and calls for mandatory sex education to today's demand from Congress for abstinence-only programs...
Monster (young adult)
By: Walter Dean Myers
"Monster" is what the prosecutor called 16-year-old Steve Harmon for his supposed role in the fatal shooting of a convenience-store owner. But was Steve really the lookout who gave the "all clear" to the murderer, or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? In this innovative novel by Walter Dean Myers, the reader becomes both juror and witness during the trial of Steve's life...
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
By: Mary Pipher
At adolescence, says Mary Pipher, "girls become 'female impersonators' who fit their whole selves into small, crowded spaces." Many lose spark, interest, and even IQ points as a "girl-poisoning" society forces a choice between being shunned for staying true to oneself and struggling to stay within a narrow definition of female...
Riding in Cars with Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good
By: Beverly Donofrio
Donofrio, a rebellious policeman's daughter, details her promiscuity and drug abuse, early pregnancy and brief marriage, and eventual success as a freelance journalist. "In this humor-flecked, street-side view of her unconventional life, Donofrio writes about a mother and her son coming of age together...
Snitch (young adult)
By: Allison van Diepen
The deal was no gangs. Ever since seventh grade, Julia and her friends have determined not to allow the gang-permeated culture of Sheepshead Bay High School to ruin their futures. But that resolve wavers after Julia falls in love with newcomer Eric, a Crip, and joins the gang herself. She feels protected by the Crips, but drugs, sex, and violence are rampant, and when Eric begins to lie to her, Julia’s carefully planned future dims...
The Adolescent: Development, Relationships and Culture
By: Kim Gayle Dolgin
Offers an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach to the study of adolescence, presenting both psychological and sociological viewpoints as well as educational, demographic, and economic data. This text discusses not just one theory on the subject, but many, and outlines the contributions, strengths, and weaknesses of each...
The First Part Last (young adult)
By: Angela Johnson
Brief, poetic, and absolutely riveting, this gem of a novel tells the story of a young father struggling to raise an infant. Bobby, 16, is a sensitive and intelligent narrator. His parents are supportive but refuse to take over the child-care duties, so he struggles to balance parenting, school, and friends who don't comprehend his new role...
The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do
By: Lynne E. Ponton
An important book for teens, their parents, educators, and anyone else associated with the sometimes unfathomable adolescent years. Beginning with an explanation of healthy versus destructive behavior, Ponton makes it clear that taking risks is an important part of the developmental process. However, unhealthy or self-destructive risk taking is another matter, and teens must understand the causes of these behaviors in order to change them...
The Vanishing Adolescent
By: Edgar A. Friedenberg
This is an excellently written and extremely timely essay. ... For those who work with this age group, this is a valuable study. Highly recommended for social science collections generally.
Thirteen Reasons Why (young adult)
By: Jay Asher
When Clay Jenson plays the cassette tapes he received in a mysterious package, he's surprised to hear the voice of dead classmate Hannah Baker. He's one of 13 people who receive Hannah's story, which details the circumstances that led to her suicide...
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ADOPTION
A Forever Family (ages 4-8)
By: Boslyn Banish & Jennifer Jordan Wong
The story of eight-year-old Jennifer Jordan-Wong, a child given up by her biological parents, who has lived in a foster home and who is now legally adopted. This true story tells about Jennifer's experiences with foster parents, social workers, and getting used to the new life she leads with her adoptive family...
A Mother for Choco (ages 4-8)
By: Keiki Kasza
Cheerful, energetic illustrations decorate the simple but charming tale of a youngster's search for a loving parent. A chubby-faced yellow bird with blue-striped feet, Choco believes that physical similarity is a prerequisite for family relationships...
Brooke (young adult)
By: V.C. Andrews
Abandoned by a mother who she barely knew Brooke received news that she was going to be granted a new home and family, her excitement grew. Brooke then became more lonely than she had ever been under the control of her superficial and materialistic new mother. All this girl wanted at first was for her new family to love her. Could Brooke find happiness although circumstance seemed to be working against her?
Butterfly (young adult)
By: V.C. Andrews
All she wanted was to be someone's little girl... Fate made her a lonely orphan, yearning for the embrace of a real family and a loving home. But a golden chance at a new life may not be enough to escape the dark secrets of her past...
Children's Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues
By: Brodzinsky, Smith, Brodzinsky
Focusing on developmental and clinical issues in children's adjustment to adoption, the authors introduce this volume with an overview of historical and contemporary perspectives, then explore various theories that have addressed the issue of psychological risk associated with adoption.
Crystal (young adult)
By: V.C. Andrews
All she wanted was a family she could call her own...As an orphan girl, Crystal was one of many -- and utterly alone. But she still dreamed of a shining life of love and happiness, and freedom from the dark legacy of her past...
Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production By: Elizabeth Bartholet
Bartholet, a single mother and Harvard Law School professor, journeyed to Peru in 1985 to adopt a child. In this account, she argues that the whole adoption business is anti child, antifamily, and anti parent. Nurturing should be central to parenting, not biological destiny, she claims, and adoption records should be open, not sealed. She persuasively argues that discrimination by age of parents, sexual preference, race, disabilities, and country of origin should be outlawed...
Goose (ages 4-8)
By: Molly Bang
This small-format volume introduces a gosling raised by a family of woodchucks who teach her "all they thought a youngster should know," including how to dig, swim and avoid hunters. Much loved by her adoptive family members, the goose is nevertheless sad because she knows she is "different." No one can make her feel better, so she sets off "into the world to see what she could figure out by herself...
Horace (ages 4-8)
By: Holly Keller
Horace is adopted. He is also spotted, and he is loved and cared for by his new mother and father--who are striped. But, as is frequently the case with adopted children who are "different", Horace feels the need to search out his roots...
How It Feels to be Adopted (ages 9-12)
By: Jill Krementz
19 boys and girls, from age 8 - 16 and from every social background, confide their feelings about this crucial fact...
Is That Your Sister: A True Story About Adoption (ages 4-8)
By: Catherine & Sherry Bunin
An adopted six-year-old girl tells about adoption and how she and her adopted sister feel about it.
I Wished for You: An Adoption Story (ages 4-8)
By: Marianne Richmond
An adoption story follows a conversation between Barley Bear and his Mama as they curl up in their favorite cuddle spot and discuss how they became a family. Barley asks Mama the questions many adopted children have, and Mama lovingly answers them all...
Let's Talk About It: Adoption (ages 4-8)
By: Fred Rogers
Rogers presents a simple look at three adoptive families. He includes a brief but reassuring reference to the birth parents and the reasons for their decision. Clear, full-color photos show happy, sad, and angry children and adults; the text suggests that such emotions occur in all families, and states that "being angry doesn't mean that love goes away...
Orphan Train Rider: One Boy's True Story (ages 9-12)
By: Andrea Warren
From 1854 to 1930, the orphan trains took homeless children from cities in the East to new homes in the West, the Midwest, and the South. In Warren's book, one man's memories of his childhood abandonment and adoption give a personal slant on the subject...
Parenting the Hurt Child: Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow
By: Gregory C. Keck and Regina Kupecky
Keck and Kupecky explore how parents can help adopted or foster children who have suffered neglect or abuse. They begin by outlining changes in adoption and fostering procedures in recent years and use case studies to document the friction and disruption introduced into a household when a hurt, adopted child is brought into the family...
Stellaluna (ages 4-8)
By: Jannell Cannon
Attacked by an owl, Stellaluna (a fruit bat) is separated from her mother and taken in by a bird and her nestlings. Dutifully, she tries to accommodate--she eats insects, hangs head up, and sleeps at night, as Mama Bird says she must--but once Stellaluna learns to fly, it's a huge relief when her own mother finds her and explains that the behavior that comes naturally is appropriate to her species...
The Family of Adoption
By: Joyce Maguire Pavao
Commitment to placing the best interests of the child first informs every page of this excellent study of the complex psychological and social dynamics of adoptive families. Pavao, an adoption therapist and the executive director of the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge, Mass., was herself adopted as an infant. She believes strongly in the necessity of pre- and post-adoptive counseling for both birth and adoptive parents, although she acknowledges that there is a serious lack of trained professionals for this purpose...
The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child
By: Nancy Verrier
You will learn to understand your adopted children and will be able to help them throughout their lives, sometimes even in the smallest way...
Train to Somewhere (ages 4-8)
By: Eve Bunting
From the mid-19th century until after World War I, thousands of homeless "orphans" were sent West by charitable agencies to find homes with families seeking workers, children to adopt, or mother's helpers. In telling the story of one child, Bunting encapsulates the fears and sometimes happy endings of those fateful trips...
Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wished Their Adoptive Parents Knew
By: Sherrie Eldridge
As both an adoptee and president of Jewel Among Jewels Adoption Network, Eldridge brings an original approach to the topic of adoption. In an attempt to inform adoptive parents of the unique issues adoptees face, she discusses adoptee anger, mourning, and shame and adoption acknowledgment while using case studies to illustrate how parents can better relate to their adopted child.
Unpuzzling Your Past
By: Emily Croom
If you've ever thought of find your roots, Emily Anne Croom's is the genealogy guide to get you going. She's got sensible chapters on how to get started, the meaning of names, the difference between a family history of dates and a family history of stories, how to gather sources, who to interview, and how to fit it all together...
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ADVOCACY
Broken
By: Shy Keenan
Shy Keenan was not meant to survive her childhood. Her mother beat her so severely that she was deaf and nearly blind by her first day in school. Her stepsister thought nothing of pouring boiling water over her, and virtually every day she was raped by her stepfather. At age 10 she was sold to a gang of dockworkers, viciously attacked, and left for dead in a field. Today, Shy is an internationally respected advocate in the fight for justice for victims of child sexual abuse.
Damaged
By: Cathy Glass
Although Jodie is only eight years old, she is violent, aggressive, and has already been through numerous foster families. Her last hope is Cathy Glass. At the Social Services office, Cathy (an experienced foster caregiver) is pressured into taking Jodie as a new placement. Jodie's challenging behavior has seen off five careers in four months. Despite her reservations, Cathy decides to take on Jodie to protect her from being placed in an institution. Cathy promises that she will stand by her no matter what...
Ghost Girl: The True Story of a Child in Peril & the Teacher Who Saved Her By: Torey Hayden
Ultimately a testament to the powers of caring and commitment, this is the story of an traumatized eight-year-old who refused to speak due to sexual abuse and possible exposure to satanic rituals...
I Speak for This Child: True Stories of a Child Advocate
By: Gay Courter
How Gay Courter became a guardian ad litem, a court-appointed advocate for children caught up in the Florida justice system, is detailed with almost Dickensian touches of abuse and familial neglect in the lives of her charges. A serendipitous event led Courter to volunteer for this relatively new position in American justice. Inexperienced in the ways of the courts but fired with idealism and courage, Courter embarked on a mission to right wrongs for victimized children who fell between the cracks of foster care and the law...
One Child
By: Torey Hayden
Sheila, a 6-year-old girl living in grinding poverty and raised by her single father faced some daunting odds when she entered Torey Hayden's special needs class. Abandoned by her mother, beaten by her father and facing a court ordered sentence to a hospital after a particularly violent episode, Sheila was extremely aggressive and wary. A true testament to her courage and Torey Hayden's belief and persistence that Sheila began confiding in her within 3 days of her classroom placement...
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CHILD ABUSE
A Child Called It
By: Dave Plezer
This autobiographical account charts the abuse of a young boy as his alcoholic mother first isolates him from the rest of the family; then torments him; and finally nearly kills him through starvation, poisoning, and one dramatic stabbing. Pelzer's portrayal of domestic tyranny and eventual escape is unforgettable...
A Piece of Cake: A Memoir
By: Cupcake Brown
Cupcake (La'Vette) Brown went from the relative security of life in a working-class neighborhood of San Diego to hardship and uncertainty when, at the age of 11, her mother died. Her estranged biological father lost interest when an expected insurance payout didn't materialize, and Cupcake and her brother were left with a merciless foster mother and her abusive son. Unable to take the mistreatment, Cupcake drifted into a life of prostitution, drug addiction, gang affiliation, stealing, homelessness, and any available means of survival...
By Their Father's Hand: The True Story of the Wesson Family Massacre
By: Monte Francis
Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California—the home of an imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces, and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home, and police officers responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered...
Child C: Surviving a Foster Mother's Reign of Terror
By: Christopher Spry
In April 2007, 62-year-old Eunice Spry was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the systematic wounding, cruelty, and assault of the vulnerable children whose welfare had been entrusted to her. Her home had become a prison where over the course of 20 years she routinely abused and tortured her charges...
Cry Silent Tears
By: Joe Peters
Joe knew his mother was cruel and violent, but he trusted his beloved father to protect him from her. When a freak accident saw his father burn to death in front of him, Joe was left at the mercy of his mother. Without the love of his friend and brother, he wouldn't have survived. With them, he went on to spend his life fighting child abuse. Joe was just five years old and the horrific scene literally struck him dumb. He didn't speak for four and a half years, which meant he was unable to ask anyone for help...
Don't Hurt Me, Mama (ages 4-8)
By: Muriel Stanek
A kind and sensitive school nurse sees that a young victim of child abuse and her abusing mother get help.
Ellen Foster
By: Kaye Gibbons
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong...
Family Secrets
By: John Bradshaw
This work is sometimes painful, but it is always enlightening—filled with the kind of “aha” moments and realizations that make everything fall into place. With John Bradshaw’s guidance, you will come to a new appreciation and acceptance of yourself. You will also be able to build more open, honest, and loving relationships with the people who matter most.
Finding Fish
By: Antwone Fisher
In Fisher's blow-by-blow account of his childhood, his sexual abuse at the hands of a female neighbor is hardly more horrifying than his foster mother's relentless cruelty, especially because respectable, churchgoing Mrs. Pickett justifies it all as due to the boy's wicked faults. Readers will be relieved when she dumps 15-year-old Antwone back at the Child Welfare office, even though he will endure homelessness and a scary spell of criminal employment, before an 11-year stint in the Navy provides him with a way forward.
Hope's Boy
By:
Andrew Bridge
Bridge's memoir of surviving his childhood in a broken child-care system where the state acts as parents for the young certainly illustrates the complexity of such government institutions. After being removed from his mother by the state, Bridge spent a brief stint in a residential program before being put into foster care. His decade-long stay with an emotionally abusive and unsupportive family left its share of marks, and the book feels like Bridge's attempt to cleanse the taint of the experience.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
By: Maya Angelou
Poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California, where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever...
It's My Body (ages 4-8)
By: Lory Freeman
Preschool children learn safe boundaries, how to distinguish between "good" and "bad" touches, and how to respond appropriately to unwanted touches. This book is a powerful book for enhancing self-esteem.
My Body is Private (ages 4-8)
By: Linda Walcoord Girard
Julie, who is nine, talks about privacy and about saying "no" to touching that makes her uncomfortable.
Not Without My Sister: The Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed
By: Christina Jones, Celeste Jones, and Juliana Buhring
Kristina, Celeste, and Juliana were all born into the Children of God cult, and from as early as three years old were mistreated and used as sexual beings. They were denied access to formal schooling, forced to wander the streets begging for money, and were mercilessly beaten for "crimes" as harmless as reading an encyclopedia. After being separated from each other and their mothers and forced to live in various missions with multiple foster parents, the sisters eventually managed to escape.
No More Secrets for Me
By: Oralee Wachter
In four separate stories on the theme of sexual abuse of children, young victims are able to articulate their feelings and defend themselves, often with the help of another person whom they trust.
No One Can Hurt Him Anymore
By: Carol Rothgeb and Scott Cup
On Sunday May 2, 1993 in Lantana, Florida, a town in the Palm Beach area, the naked body of ten-year-old Andrew "A. J." Schwarz was found floating face down in the family's backyard swimming pool. But how could he have drowned when the water level was only four feet deep? And why was his body covered with cuts and bruises from head to toe? Suspicion soon fastened on the dead boy's stepmother, Jessica Schwarz...
Nobody's Child
By: Michael Seed and Noel Botham
Michael Seed's childhood was a daily ordeal of unspeakable neglect, misery, and abuse from an alcoholic father whose tyranny ruined his son’s formative years and drove his wife to suicide. On a daily basis both Michael and his mother would fall under the man’s wrath, and one awful night Michael’s father began sexually abusing his son, a trend that would continue for years. Worse still, the abuse did not stop at home...
Promise Not to Tell (age 9-12)
By: Carolyn Polese
A novel about sexual abuse. Meagan is pleased when Walt, the cowboy on the ranch where she and her family are vacationing, gives her extra time on horseback. But when he lures her into the woods one night with the promise of more riding and then grabs her, she is confused...
Randall's Wall (ages 9-12)
By: Carol Fenner
The name Randall Lord sounds so elegant. The irony is that it is attached to a boy who is, in fact, so filthy that he is shunned by his fifth-grade classmates and avoided by his teachers. All of the Lord children have met with similar treatment. They have no running water at home, their abusive father is usually not around, and their mother is dysfunctional...
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood
By: Julie Gregory
From early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on—in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker—almost always the mother—invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals...
Something Happened and I'm Scared to Tell (ages 4-8)
By: Patricia Kehoe
With the help of a friendly lion, a young sexual abuse victim is able to talk about sexual abuse and recover self-esteem. Gentle and positive approach to reassure children.
The Family Secret (A Woman's Incestuous Relationship with Her Father
By: Eleanore Hill
A factual account that reads like a novel of a young incest victim and her struggle to keep hidden the family secret...
The Grey Zone
By: Daphna Edwards Ziman
Kelly Jensen was only six years old when she witnessed her mother's murder, for which her father was wrongfully convicted. Moved from foster home to foster home, Kelly was exposed to abuse, neglect, and human trafficking. By age fifteen she was a runaway, combining her innate intelligence with street smarts to become a chameleon capable of losing herself in every character she impersonated. Beautiful and bewitching, Kelly used her talents to become the most notorious identity thief in the country...
The Healing Power of Play: Working with Abused Children
By: Eliana Gil, PhD
This book describes how therapists can both facilitate constructive play therapy and intervene in posttraumatic play to help children who have been traumatized by abuse or neglect achieve a positive resolution...
The Lost Boy
By: Dave Pelzer
Here Pelzer tells his story from the time he left his abusive mother and alcoholic father, through his experiences in five foster homes and juvenile detention, and how he eventually made it into the Air Force. He was a defiant, rebellious boy who, despite his background and personality, managed to endear himself to many guardians, social workers, and teachers...
The Silent Children
By: Linda Sanford
Parents guide to prevention of child sexual abuse.
The Step Child: The True Story of a Broken Childhood
By: Donna Ford
Abused by her stepmother between the ages of five and eleven, Donna Ford was labeled 'the bastard', the 'little witch,' and 'the evil one.' She was beaten, isolated, and afraid to even look at her own reflection by physical and mental abuse that eventually progressed to the most appalling sexual attacks...
The Transcendent Child: Tales of Triumph Over the Past
By: Lillian Rubin
As a practicing psychotherapist, Rubin has been struck by the ability of some people to overcome troubled beginnings and become functional adults. In the stories collected here, which include the author's, there is a diversity of problems, personalities and reactions: child abuse, the battered wife, emotional and physical rejection, even a priest's struggle with feelings of isolation, all springing from early dysfunctional family settings...
What Jamie Saw
By: Carolyn Coman
Coman articulates nine-year-old Jamie's baffled, stream-of-consciousness observations of a violent act that robs him of his security, but not his innocence. Awakened in the middle of the night by some primal sense of alarm, the sleep-disoriented boy watches his stepfather reach into his baby sister's crib and throw her across the room...
When I Was Little Like You (ages 4-8)
By: Jane Porett
The narrator tells children how to recognize sexual abuse and know what to do if it happens to them.
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CHILD DEVELOPMENT & DISCIPLINE
Between Parent and Child
By: Dr. Haim G. Ginott
Over the past thirty-five years, Between Parent and Child has helped millions
of parents around the world strengthen their relationships with their children. Written by renowned psychologist Dr. Haim Ginott, this revolutionary book offered a straightforward prescription for empathetic yet disciplined child rearing and introduced new communication techniques that would change the way parents spoke with, and listened to, their children.
Between Parent and Teen
By: Dr. Haim G. Ginott
Provides solid advice along with scenarios of how to deal with particular situations. This is not a book that you have to read from cover to cover, you can start anywhere in the book depending on the situation at hand...
Beyond the Best Interest of the Child
By: J. Goldstein, A. Freud, A. Solnit
As set out in this volume, then, a child’s placement should rest entirely on consideration for the child’s own inner situation and developmental needs. Simple as this rule sounds, there are circumstances which make it difficult to apply even with ample evidence in support of the child’s interests. The injunction disregards that laws are made by adults for the protection of adult rights...
Caring for Your Adolescent: Ages 12 to 21
By: D. Greydanus
Covering issues such as drug abuse and contraception, this reference book addresses issues to help parents meet the unique challenges of the adolescent years.
Caring for Your Baby and Young Child:
Birth to Age 5
By: American Academy of Pediatrics and Steven P. Chelov
It's Sunday after dark. Your baby is sick, hurt, or acting strangely, and the doctor won't be in until tomorrow. How can you find out what to do when your healthcare professionals are unreachable? You may only need to go as far as your bookshelf. The revised edition of Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age 5, provides a wealth of authoritative child-care information in an easy-to-use format.
Caring for Your School-Aged Child: Ages 5 to 12
By: Edward L. Schor
Puberty, divorce, drugs, masturbation, eating disorders, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are all waiting to ambush the unsuspecting parent in a midchild crisis, and each one is thoroughly addressed in this encyclopedic tour of the years between infancy and adolescence...
Drive to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder From Childhood to Adult
By: Edward Hallowell, John Ratey
Although ADD can generate a host of problems, there are also advantages to having it, advantages that this book will stress, such as high energy, intuitiveness, creativity, and enthusiasm, and they are completely overlooked by the 'disorder' model." The authors go on to cite Mozart and Einstein as examples of probable ADD sufferers...
Early Childhood Years: The 2 to 6 Year Old
By: Theresa and Frank Caplan
Helps to understand the ages and stages of childhood growth and development...
Emotional Intelligence
By: Daniel Golman
The Western cultures esteem analytical skills measured by IQ tests: but there is clearly more to success and happiness, even in technological societies, than IQ alone. Goleman has written one of the best books on the nature and importance of other kinds of intelligence besides our perhaps overly beloved IQ...
First Feelings: Milestones in the Emotional Development of Your Baby
By: Stanly and Nancy Greenspan
Greenspan outlines the six stages of emotional growth in early childhood and explores the ways in which they are communicated, emphasizing parental interaction as the key to a child's healthy, emotional maturation.
Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence
By: Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley
The authors of Ghosts from the Nursery produce compelling if not controversial evidence that violent behavior is learned and cultivated in the first few months of childhood development. Even more startling, the authors Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley believe that a predisposition to violent behavior can be learned before birth. A "chemical wash" of toxins such as drugs and alcohol, combined with a mother's stress hormones generated from rage or fear can directly effect the babie's brain development. Illustrative case studies and anecdotes make for a fascinating and factually "fat" read.
Growing a Girl: Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong, Spirited Daughter By: Barbara MacKoff
It's no news that many self-assured, spirited girls lose their exuberance and confidence during adolescence. Mackoff, a family therapist, hopes to counteract this effect by arming parents with the means to help younger girls (preschool through age 12) develop and maintain confidence as they grow...
Healthy Parenting: How Your Upbringing Influences the Way You Raise Your Children and What You Can Do to Make it Better for Them
By: Janet G. Woititz, Ed.D
If you grew up in a troubled or dysfunctional family and suffered through a parent's problems with chronic illness, addiction, emotional upheaval, or loss, you probably know what you don't want for your kids. But you may lack the tools and experiences to create the nurturing home you do want...
Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development
By: T. Berry Brazelton
This edition includes the pressures on working mothers, the difficult decision of when to return to work, and the excitement of nurturing fathers...
It's Nobody's Fault, New Hope and Help for Difficult Children
By: Harold Koplewicz, MD
People who wouldn't dream of blaming parents for a child's asthma or diabetes are often quick to blame bad parenting for a child's hyperactivity, depression, or school phobia. The parents, in turn, often blame their children, believing that they're lazy or rebellious. Even worse, the children with these psychological problems often blame themselves, convinced that they're just bad kids. In It's Nobody's Fault, esteemed child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Harold S. Kopelwicz at last puts an end to this pointless--and erroneous--cycle of blame and helps parents get the help they need for their troubled children.
Madeline's World: A Biography of a Three Year Old
By: Brian Hall
With his trademark subtle humor and novelist’s eye for the telling detail, Hall recounts her first laugh, first words, first tantrum, and brings it all to life from the inside out. By speculating on his daughter’s perceptions as she grows, Hall gives us insights into the evolution of language, attachments and separations, and a youngster’s curiosity and fear...
Nurture Shock
By: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
The central premise of this book by Bronson and Merryman, is what many of modern society's most popular strategies for raising children are in fact backfiring because key points in the science of child development and behavior have been overlooked...
Parenting a Child with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
By: Darlene Contadino and Nancy Boyles
A guide for parents and educators, Boyles and Contadino combine over 23 years of experience to provide basic information on strategies and ideas that may be useful when working with the AD/HD child.
Raising Boys: Why Boys Are Different and How to Help Them Become Happy and Well-Balanced Men
By: Steve Biddulph
Australian family therapist Biddulph joins the chorus of counselors calling for a focused, supportive approach to parenting boys. Citing such gender specific risks facing boys as a higher percentage of learning disabilities to greater threats of violence and suicide, Biddulph maps out parenting strategies for three distinct stages of growth, from birth to six years, from six to 14, and from 14 to adult.
Raising a Daughter: Parents and the Awaking of a Healthy Woman
By: Jeanne Elium and Don Elium
Society’s confusing and often contradictory messages to girls and women make raising a daughter an especially daunting responsibility for any parent. Girls are born believing that they can do anything, but growing up they face new obstacles, as their bodies and social roles begin to change. In RAISING A DAUGHTER, Jeanne and Don Elium address these challenges and guide parents through each stage of a girl’s development, from infancy through middle childhood, the teen years, and early adulthood.
Raising a Son: Parents and the Making of a Healthy Man
By: Jeanne Elium and Don Elium
While much has been written about raising children in general, the authors, both family counselors, focus specifically on the challenge of raising sons. They trace the history of pre-technological societies where rites of passage turned boys into men, noting that no such rites exist today in our society...
Smart Start: The Parents Complete Guide to Preschool Education
By: Marian E. Borden
The move from babyhood into preschool is a big transition for parents and little children. Smart Start by Marian Edelman Borden will lead the anxious, the reluctant, and the ignorant parent of a pre-preschool child to serenity, eagerness, knowledge--and a good preschool.
SOS Help for Parents
By: Lynn Clark
PhD.
You learn the best methods for improving your child s behavior and for reducing stress in your life. You learn essential child rearing rules, how to avoid four common child rearing errors, primary methods for increasing good behavior, major methods for stopping bad behavior, active ignoring, Grandmas Rule, how to avoid nine common time-out mistakes, etc....
The Emotional Life of the Toddler
By: Alicia F. Lieberman
Many books cover the physical and cognitive abilities of the toddler, but Lieberman's is the first to offer an in-depth examination of the varied and intense emotional life of children from ages one to three.
The Father's Almanac
By: S. Adams Sullivan
A perennial bestseller, now revised and updated for a new generation of fathers, this readable, inspiring guide to the world of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers is an indispensable treasury of advice, ideas, and suggestions.
The Magic Years: Understanding & Handling Problems of Early Childhood
By: Selma M. Fraiberg
The Magic Years is almost 40 years old, yet this book still offers a wonderful way of looking at how kids think, and why they act the way they do based on their cognitive and emotional abilities...
The Mother's Almanac
By: Marquerite Kelly and Elia ParsonsA national bestseller with more than 750,000 copies in print, now revised for the new mothers of the '90s -- the latest findings on health, advice for working mothers, facts about the influence of TV, and more...
Touchpoints: Your Child's Emotional and Behavioral Development
By: T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua D. Sparrow
All over the U.S. and in over twenty countries around the world, Touchpoints has become required reading for anxious parents of babies and small children. T. Berry Brazelton's great empathy for the universal concerns of parenthood, and honesty about the complex feelings it engenders, as well as his uncanny insight into the predictable leaps and regressions of early childhood, have comforted and supported families since its publication in 1992.
What to Expect the First Year
By: Eisenberg, Murkoff, Hathaway
What to Expect the 1st Year is a comprehensive and practical month-by-month guide that clearly explains everything parents need to know - or might be worrying about - in the first year with a new baby...
What to Expect the Toddler Years
By: Eisenberg, Murkoff, Hathaway
Parents of toddlers will find this a refreshingly well detailed, comprehensive presentation on what to expect during the second and third years of a child's life...
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
By: Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson
A genuine enthusiasm for their subject shines through the pages of this enormously compelling book, as the authors share insights on boys' emotional development from birth through the college years and increasingly high-profile topic in the wake of disheartening statistics about adolescent suicide and violence. In much the same way that Reviving Ophelia offered new models for raising girls, therapists Kindlon and Thompson argue that boys desperately need a new standard of "emotional literacy,"...
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CULTURAL ISSUES, DISPROPORTIONALITY, AND RACE
Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation
By: Jonathan Kozol
Alice and Kozol paint a vivid portrait of life in one of America's most impoverished neighborhoods, New York City's South Bronx. While telling similar stories, each narrative has its own unique flavor and characteristics that reveal the crushing nature of poverty in America and recount the lives of those who rise above it...
Caring for Infants and Toddlers in Violent Environments
By: Joy Osofsky and Emily Fenichel
It is tempting to believe that infants are less affected than older children by violence in their surroundings. This report from Zero to Three makes it impossible to indulge in this fantasy. Violence, it is clear, has profound effects on the development and well-being of the very young, and even infants can show symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder...
Chiquita's Cocoon
By: Bettina R. Flores
In lively, upbeat style, this book targets the cultural conflicts that face Latina women who seek a nontraditional lifestyle. Based on her own experiences and those of 200 women she interviewed, Flores argues powerfully that Latinas shouldn't feel bad about wanting money; nor should they limit themselves to the barrio or reject education...
Color Blind: A Memoir By Precious Williams
Months upon her birth, her mother leaves her with a foster mother to raise Precious "Anita" Williams. Anita is raised by an elderly white woman and knows nothing of her own culture. Being ignorant of her own past, she is an outsider among other Africans, and because of the color of her skin, she is outcast in her community. Besides feeling out of place and unloved by the mother who left her for someone else to raise and only appeared from time to time to abuse her, Anita's life was traumatic...
Color of Water
By: James McBride
A wonderful story of a bi-racial family who succeeded and achieved the American dream, despite the societal obstacles placed in its way...
Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women & Girls in Poor America
By: Lisa Dodson
During school, Dodson worked in a candy and an electronics factory; later, she served as an ob/gyn nurse in a poor and violent neighborhood. Now that she's a fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, she has melded those experiences into an account that addresses frequent stereotypes of women on welfare. Dodson used focus groups, interviews and surveys, offering money in exchange for cooperation...
Ethnic America: Readings in Race, Class, and Gender
By: Eric Vega, Wayne Maeda
An interdisciplinary approach to discussing race, class, and gender issues in the United States. Covering dysfunctions, theory, and current events, this book is a compilation of recent articles in the field of Ethnic America. Specific articles dealing with the history of African-American, Asian Pacific Red Indians, Native Americans, and Latinos provides a grounding for students to analyze propositions raised in more traditional sociology and anthropology classes.
Flight: A Novel
By: Sherman Alexie
Half-Indian, half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was 10 (after he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several people and is shot dead himself...
Indian Killer
By: Sherman Alexie
The main character is an Indian serial killer who incites racial tension by murdering whites in retribution for his people's history. The killer leaves clear signs of his motives by scalping his victims, and leaving feathers as gestures of Indian defiance. The killer is a conflicted creation--raised by loving white parents, but twisted by loss of his identity as an Indian...
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology & Culture Shape the Way We Parent By: Meredith F. Small
How we raise our children differs greatly from society to society, with many cultures responding differently to such questions as how a parent should respond to a crying child, how often a baby should be nursed, and at what age a child should learn to sleep alone. Ethnopediatrics--the study of parents, children, and child rearing across cultures--is the subject of anthropologist Meredith F. Small's thorough and fascinating book Our Babies, Ourselves.
Our Kind of People, Inside America's Upper Class
By: Lawrence Otis Graham
Graham has produced a book that casts an unblinking eye on America's black elite, cataloguing its achievements while critically analyzing its shortcomings. It is a must read for anyone interested in African-American history and the impact of ideas about social class on our society...
Ourselves as Mothers: Universal Experience of Motherhood
By: Sheila Kitzinger
Her latest book, Kitzinger explores women's shared experiences around the world, highlighting the role of women in different cultures and the ways in which the images of motherhood are socially constructed. With this cross-cultural perspective, Kitzinger puts motherhood in both a historical and a sociological context...
Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform
By: Sanford F. Schram, Jose Soss, Richard C. Fording
It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole.
Race, Class and Gender in the U.S.
By: Paula S. Rothenberg
Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study presents students with a compelling, clear study of issues of race, gender, and sexuality within the context of class. Rothenberg deftly and consistently helps students analyze each phenomena, as well as the relationships among them, thereby deepening their understanding of each issue surrounding race and ethnicity.
Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities
By: Amanda E. Lewis
Could your kids be learning a fourth R at school: reading, writing, ’rithmatic, and race? While race of course is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools...
Race Matters in Child Welfare: The Overrepresentation of African American Children in the System
By: Denette Derezotes, Mark Testa, and John Poertner
This compilation of papers critically examines child welfare policy and practice, the causes of child maltreatment and how each affects the disproportionate representation of African American children in the system.
Shattered Bonds
By: Dorothy Roberts
Roberts, a law professor, offers a sharp, probing look at the alarming public policy that separates children from troubled low-income black families while making efforts to keep similarly troubled white families together. On the basis of 25 years of research on federal, state, and local welfare programs nationwide, Roberts reveals a system that fails to protect the interests of black children...
The Broken Cord
By: Michael Dorris
When Michael Dorris, 26, single, working on his doctorate, and part Indian himself, applied to adopt an Indian child, his request was speedily granted. He knew that his new three-year-old son, Adam, was badly developmentally disabled; but he believed in the power of nurture and love. This is the heartrending story, full of compassion and rage, of how his son grew up mentally retarded, a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome whom no amount of love could make whole...
The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America
By: Shelby Steele
Steele, seeking to improve strained race relations, demonstrates how social policies intensify rather than lessen racial differences, how blacks and whites tend to see color before character, and how blacks are often oppressed more by doubt in their abilities than by racism.
The Joy Luck Club
By: Amy Tan
A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China...
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
By: Anne Fadiman
Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance."
There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
By: Alex Kotlowitz
The devastating story of brothers Lafayette and Pharaoh Rivers, children of the Chicago ghetto, is powerfully told here by Kotlowitz, who first met the boys in 1985 when they were 10 and seven, respectively. Their family includes a mother, a frequently absent father, an older brother and younger triplets. We witness the horrors of growing up in an ill-maintained housing project tyrannized by drug gangs and where murders and shootings frequently occur...
Transracial Adoption and Foster Care: Practice Issues for Professionals
By: Joseph Crumbley
The purpose of this book is to go beyond the arguments and ask the question: How do we as professionals help children and families make transracial adoptions and foster placements work...
Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race
By: Frances E. Kendall
Frances Kendall here invites readers to consider how race can frame our experiences, relationships and the way in which we see the world, and offers suggestions for how differences of opportunity can be overcome. Focusing on racial privilege, the book explores sensitive issues through numerous stories and anecdotes to illustrate the dynamics of race relations in the US today...
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
By: Tim Wise
Racial privilege shapes the lives of white Americans in every facet of life, from employment and education to housing and criminal justice. Using stories from his own life, Tim Wise shows that racism not only burdens people of color, but also benefits those who are "white like him" whether or not they’re actively racist.
White Privilege
By: Paula S. Rothenburg
Studies of racism often focus on its devastating effects on the victims of prejudice. But no discussion of race is complete without exploring the other side--the ways in which some people or groups actually benefit, deliberately or inadvertently, from racial bias. This is the subject of Paula Rothenberg's groundbreaking anthology, White Privilege.
Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society
By: Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Schultz, and David Wellman
White Americans, abetted by neo-conservative writers of all hues, generally believe that racial discrimination is a thing of the past and that any racial inequalities that undeniably persist--in wages, family income, access to housing or health care--can be attributed to African Americans' cultural and individual failures. If the experience of most black Americans says otherwise, an explanation has been sorely lacking--or obscured by the passions the issue provokes. At long last offering a cool, clear, and informed perspective on the subject, this book brings together a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars to scrutinize the logic and evidence behind the widely held belief in a color-blind society--and to provide an alternative explanation for continued racial inequality in the United States.
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity
By: Beverly Daniel Tatum
Tatum, a developmental psychologist a special interest in the emerging field of racial-identity development, is a consultant to school systems and community groups on teaching and learning in a multicultural context. Not only has she studied the distinctive social dynamics faced by black youth educated in predominantly white environments, but since 1980, Tatum has developed a course on the psychology of racism and taught it in a variety of university settings.
Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing Up Alone
By: DeWayne Wickman
Wickham is a syndicated columnist for USA Today and the Gannett News Service. He was the first African American journalist in the United States to be syndicated, and he has served as former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Wickham was only eight years old when his mother and father were killed in a murder/suicide. His personal story is a bittersweet and moving narrative of growing up poor, black, and orphaned in Baltimore's Cherry Hill during the Civil Rights era.
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DOMESTIC VIOLENCE & SUBSTANCE ABUSE
A Family That Fights (ages 4-8)
By: Sharon Bernstein
As Henry attempts to shield his younger siblings from their father's abuse of their mother, he worries, experiences embarrassment and fear, and succumbs to daydreaming. Final comments stress that the children are not the cause of or to be blamed for their parents' actions. Appended are lists of what children can do to help themselves and what parents can do.
A Terrible Thing Happened (ages 4 to 8)
By: Margaret M. Holmes
Sherman Smith saw the most terrible thing happen. At first he tried to forget about it, but soon something inside him started to bother him. He felt nervous for no reason. Sometimes his stomach hurt. He had bad dreams. And he started to feel angry and do mean things, which got him in trouble. Then he met Ms. Maple, who helped him talk about the terrible thing that he had tried to forget...
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
By: David Sheff
Beautiful Boy is Nic's story, but from the perspective of his father, David. Achingly honest, it chronicles the betrayal, pain, and terrifying question marks that haunt the loved ones of an addict. Many respond to addiction with a painful oath of silence, but David Sheff opens up personal wounds to reinforce that it is a disease, and must be treated as such...
Children of Battered Women
By: Jeffe, Wolfe, and Wilson
The devastating impact of family violence on children, the links between violence and spouse abuse on child development and clinical dysfunction, children's views of violence, and strategies for intervention and prevention are considered in this volume...
Clover's Secret (ages 4-8)
By: Christine Winn
Nine-year-old friends deal with the violent home life of one.
Daddy Doesn't Have to Be a Giant Anymore (ages 4-8)
By: Jane Resh Thomas
A little girl tells readers about the fun she has with her father, who sings songs and takes her on picnics. But when he sneaks into the garage to drink whiskey, he turns into a frightening giant...
Effects of Domestic Violence on Children
By: Ronald E. Sharp and Waln K. Brown
The National Crime Survey (conducted by the Department of Justice) reported the following: 1) about 1.5 million cases of domestic violence involving children are reported each year; 2) another million cases go unreported and 3) between two and five thousand children die each year because of domestic violence. Domestic violence involving children is more than doubling every decade. While some of this huge growth can be attributed to increased reporting and better record keeping, domestic violence against children is reaching epidemic proportions.
Family Violence: How to Recognize and Survive It (ages 9-12)
By: Janice E. Rench
A book that explores many forms of abuse (physical, emotional, sexual), including that which is directed at children by adults and sibling-to-sibling; between spouses; and toward the elderly. Fictionalized examples are provided at the start of each chapter, followed by explanations in a question-and-answer format. There is a chapter on self-esteem, a list of further reading, and good information (as well as resources) on how and where to get help.
Family Violence: Legal, Medical, and Social Perspectives
By: Harvey Wallace and Cliff Roberson
This book presents an introduction to the complicated area of family violence while providing the reader with sufficient knowledge to understand the various dynamics involved in family abuse. The more commonly discussed topics of family violence are presented from a medical, social, and legal perspective.
Gender Violence: Inderdisciplinary Perspectives
By: O'Toole, Schiffman, and Kiter-Edwards
In the fully revised second edition of this path-breaking anthology, the editors bring together emerging scholarship from feminist, post-modern, and queer theory with classic articles and central authors in the fields of gender, sexuality and violence. This edition features a new comprehensive introduction, revised section introductions, and eighteen new selections, including original articles on sex trafficking, masculinity and terrorism, and community responses to gender violence. Other topics represented in this volume include sexual harassment and violence in schools and workplaces, child abuse, intimate partner violence, and pornography.
It Could Happen to Anyone: Why Battered Women Stay
By: Ola W. Barnett, Alyce LaViolette
Ola W. Barnett is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. She has coauthored two best-selling Sage books (with Alyce D. LaViolette) on why battered women stay with abusive partners. These books provide a scientific explanation, grounded in learning theory, for understanding the obstacles battered women face in trying to break free.
Mommy and Daddy are Fighting (ages 4-8)
By: Susan Paris and Gail Labinski
A young girl tries to come to terms with her parents' quarreling and fighting. Includes discussion questions for adults to use with children.
Something is Wrong at My House (ages 4-8)
By: Diane Davis
How can kids understand and cope when their parents fight? Based on a true story, this 32-page book shows a child seeking, and finally obtaining, help in a domestic violence situation.
Sometimes My Mom Drinks Too Much (ages 9-12)
By: Kevin, Kenny & Helen Krull
Her feelings toward her alcoholic mother vary as Maureen struggles to understand her mother's illness.
Surviving Domestic Violence: Voices of Women Who Broke Free
By: Elaine Weiss
Surviving Domestic Violence tells the stories of twelve women. Each was a victim of domestic violence, escaped from her abuser, reclaimed her dignity, reconstructed her life, and rediscovered peace. Domestic violence doesn’t just happen "out there" somewhere. It happens in our town, in our neighborhood, on our street. It happens to women we see at work, the supermarket, the movie theater, the ballet and the PTA board meeting. Every woman who has left an abusive man and every woman who has yet to leave will find encouragement and hope in the voices of these women who broke free.
The Batterer As Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics
By: R. Lundy Bancroft and Dr. Jay G. Silverman
The Batterer as Parent takes the reader inside of homes affected by domestic violence, imparting an understanding of the atmosphere that battering men create for the children who live with them. Bancroft and Silverman show how partner abuse affects each relationship in a family, and explains how children’s emotional recovery is inextricably linked to the healing and empowerment of their mothers...
The Boy Who Didn't Want to Be Sad (ages 4-8)
By: Rob Goldblatt
This story utilizes the vivid colors and art to teach children how feelings of sadness and happiness are natural experiences in life. Includes "Note to Parents" section.
The Lost Years: Surviving a Mother and Daughter's Worst Nightmare
By: Kristina Wandzilak
A child caught in the horror of alcohol and drug addition. A mother helplessly standing by unable to save her. The Lost Years is the real life story of just such a mother and child, each giving their first-hand accounts of the years lost to addiction and despair...
The Window (ages 9-12)
By: Michael Dorris
Her Native American mother is dysfunctional as a parent, yet Rayona obviously loves her. When Mom enters a chemical dependency treatment program, Rayona's black father, who has also been unreliable and is unwilling to care for her himself, cons a social-worker girl friend into sneaking her into a foster home...
The Words Hurt: Helping Children Cope with Verbal Abuse (ages 9-12)
By: Chris Loftis
Physical abuse is not the only thing that scars a child. Words hurt too, and children often have no way of handling the harsh criticism of parents. In The Words Hurt, readers follow the story of Greg, whose father's problems have caused him to lash out at this son and fail to express the love he truly feels...
Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines
By: Nic Sheff
Sheff relates his personal struggle with drugs and alcohol in this poignant and often disturbing memoir...
What's Left of Us
By: Richard Farrell
Richard Farrell is an author, filmmaker, teacher, journalist, and adjunct professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. His documentary, High on Crack Street, was aired on HBO and received Columbia University's duPont Award. The Fighter, a feature film based on High on Crack Street, will be released in 2011 staring Mark Whalberg, Christian Bale, and Farrell playing himself.
When Dad Hurts Mom: Helping Your Children Heal the Wounds of Witnessing Abuse
By: Lundy Bancroft
Nearly three-quarters of women who are chronically mistreated by their partners have children. In this sensitive, respectful book, counselor, speaker, trainer and activist Bancroft (Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men) gives those women ways to help their children heal from the pain of seeing such abuse. Using anecdotes, Q&As, bulleted "points to remember" and a caring but firm tone, Bancroft tells abused mothers exactly what actions they should take to help their children.
When I Feel Angry (ages 4-8)
By: Cornelia Maude Spelman
It's hard to be a bunny. Sometimes a bunny feels angry--especially if someone is teasing or if Mom is paying more attention to the new baby in the family. But there are things a bunny can do to keep anger from taking over--exercise, rest, cry, or even ask for help. This gentle book puts an adorable bunny in a variety of situations that preschool or grade-school children can relate to.
When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right By: Ann Jones and Susan Schechter
A helpful book for the woman who feels unsafe in her relationship. How to identify and escape the partner who uses various types of force to exert control...
When Someone In The Family Drinks Too Much
By: Richard C. Langsen
A highly accessible title on a troublesome topic, this picture book by a husband-and-wife team could be of inestimable value to children struggling with alcoholism in their families. Featuring a cast of bears, the artwork allows children a safe distance while the text delivers the lowdown ("There are 28 million alcoholics in America. One out of every ten people has this illness")...
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EFFECTS OF TRAUMA, ATTACHMENT & SEPARATION ON CHILDREN
A Gift for Tia Rosa
By: Karen T. Taha
Carmela can't wait for Tia Rosa to come home from the hospital and continue teaching her how to knit. Everyday, though, the elderly Tia Rosa's health worsens. When she dies, Carmela is stricken with grief. Carmela decides that the best way to honor her aunt's memory is to make something...
Badger's Parting Gifts (ages 4-8)
By: Susan Varley
Badger's friends are overwhelmed with their loss when he dies. By sharing their memories of his gifts, they find the strength to face the future with hope.
Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love
By: Robert Karen
The complex topic of attachment theory is opened up to parents, as well as other interested adults, by putting issues of child development, usually couched in antiseptic academic parlance, in lay terms. Ranging through historical developments in the field, Karen, formerly a psychotherapist in the pediatric unit of Bellevue Hospital, attempts to demystify "mother love," or the bond babies have with their primary caregiver (Karen is also concerned with what happens to babies when that bond is disrupted).
Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love Based Approach to Helping Attachment-Challenges Children With Severe Behaviors
By: Heather T. Forbes
Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control covers in detail the effects of trauma on the body-mind and how trauma alters children's behavioral responses. The first four chapters help parents and professionals clearly understand the neurological research behind the basic model given in this book, deemed, 'The Stress Model.' While scientifically based in research, it is written in an easy to understand and easy to grasp format for anyone working with or parenting children with severe behaviors.
Blow Me a Kiss, Miss Lilly (ages 4-8)
By: Nancy White Carlstrom
A beautifully executed story of a young girl's response to the death of an elderly friend. Miss Lilly and her cat Snug live across the street from Sara, who spends a great deal of time there talking, helping tend the flowers, and making plum jelly. Whenever it's time for Sara to leave, she and Miss Lilly blow kisses as their special way of saying they will always be friends).
Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children
By: Daniel Hughes
Building the Bonds of Attachment is the second edition of a critically and professionally acclaimed book for social workers, therapists, and parents who strive to assist poorly attached children. This work is a composite case study of the developmental course of one child following years of abuse and neglect.
Children Who Shock and Surprise: A Guide to Attachment Disorders
By: Elizabeth Randolph, MSN, PhD
This 58 page book is brief, yet comprehensive and to the point. An easy read to help better understand the child with attachment disorder.
Dear Mr. Henshaw
By: Beverly Cleary
When, in second grade, Leigh writes to an author to tell him how much he "licked" his book, he never suspects that he'll still be writing to him four years later. And he never imagines the kinds of things he'll be writing about.
Don't Touch My Heart
By: Gianforte-Mansfield & C. Waldman
Don't Touch My Heart is a valuable tool for parents struggling with an attachment-disordered child. It provides a sense of kinship- a knowledge that they are not alone in their pain and frustration- and reinforces the fact that helpful treatment is available.
Grandad Bill's Song (ages 4-8)
By: Jane Yolen
A story of a young boy who is grieving for his recently deceased grandfather...
Helping Children Cope with Separation and Loss
By: Claudia L. Jewett
A valuable tool for both family members and helping professionals. Here is a compassionate, practical book for any adult who wants to help a child recover from the stages of denial and mourning that can follow the loss of a loved one.
High Risk Children Without a Conscience
By: Dr. Ken Magid
The authors explore the reasons why children without a conscience are growing in number. They are at risk of becoming "trust bandits," con-men, liars, dance-away lovers, back stabbers of the business world, and even psychopathic killers.
How It Feels When a Parent Dies (ages 9-12)
By: Jill Krementz
18 children from age 7 - 17, speak openly of their experiences and feelings. As they speak we see them in photos with their surviving parent and with other family members, in the midst of their everyday lives.
How It Feels When Parents Divorce (ages 9-12)
By: Jill Krementz
Photographs and simple, thoughtful narrations create sensitive portraits of children who have undergone family crises.
I Wish I Had My Father (ages 4-8)
By: Norma Simon
Father's Day is tough for a boy whose father left him years ago and never communicates with him.
Lone Wolf (ages 9-12)
By: Kristine L. Franklin
An 11-year-old boy who lives with his reclusive father gradually warms up to a new friend and her large, loud, and loving family. A tightly narrated story about coming to terms with past tragedies.
Losing Uncle Tim (ages 9-12)
By: Mary Kate Jordan
Daniel tells about his friendship with his uncle and about how he learns that his uncle is dying from AIDS.
My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel
By: Peggy Mann
This quick read provides poignant insight into the mind-games which run through a child's brain when faced with personal disaster. What could be more devastating to a child's security than the sudden realization that his parents have decided to divorce?
Owl Babies (ages 4-8)
By: Maritn Waddell
Three worried owlets wait for their mother to return from her night flight.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children
By: Spencer Eth M.D., Robert S. Pynoos
Since the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder as an Axis I diagnosis in DSM-III, the investigation of PTSD in children has developed into an exciting new area of psychiatric enquiry. This volume assembles the leading participants in this newly emerging field in a discussion of the often profound impact of traumatic occurrences on the lives of children.
The Accident (ages 4-8)
By: Carol Carrick
After his dog Bodger is hit by a truck and killed, Christopher must deal with his feelings of depression and guilt.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog
By: Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz
A world-renowned child psychiatrist takes us inside his pioneering work with trauma victims to offer a groundbreaking new perspective on how stress and violence affect children's brains and how they can be helped to heal.
The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (ages 4-8)
By: Judith Viorst
My cat Barney died this Friday. I was very sad. My mother said we could have a funeral for him, and I should think of ten good things about Barney so I could tell them... But the small boy who loved Barney can only think of nine. Later, while talking with his father, he discovers the tenth and begins to understand.
The Year Without Michael (teens)
By: Susan Beth Pfeffer
The week before he is to begin his first year of high school, Michael Chapman disappears on the way to a friend's house. This book is a gripping chronicle of his family's reaction during the year after that disappearance.
Too Scared to Cry: Psychic Trauma In Childhood
By: Lenore Terr
When children witness or experience sudden, shocking events, how do they assimilate the horror? Terr found they don't simply forget and grow up unscathed. Evidence proves the trauma is recorded and repeatedly replayed by the mind. That these recurring images manifest themselves in different guises is especially intriguing in light of her speculation about repressed trauma in the work of Hitchcock, Stephen King and others. The stories here will break your heart, but Terr's advice for aiding traumatized children can help counter the blows of a violent world.
Unchained Memories: True Stories Of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found By: Lenore Terr
Much controversy exists about whether or not childhood memories repressed for many years can be fully retrieved in adulthood without major distortions (otherwise known as the "false memory" debate). In this fascinating book, Terr presents a well-balanced, insightful examination of memory.
What Happened to Johnnie Jordan?: The Story of a Child Turning Violent By: Jennifer Toth
Jennifer Toth tells the ghastly story of Johnnie Jordan, a 14-year-old boy from "Toledo's ghetto" who had worked his way through 19 foster homes before finding himself placed with Charles and Jeannette Johnson, an elderly couple who agreed to take him in. For reasons that remain obscure, Jordan murdered Mrs. Johnson. Toth presents him as an example of "an apparently new phenomenon of young, rage-filled killers taking lives with motiveless passion or no remorse...
You Hold Me and I'll Hold You (ages 4-8)
By: Joe Carson
This book is a quiet, simple way to talk about death with children without scaring them. The little girl has already dealt with major traumas in her life, her mother walked out on their family, her hamster died and so when her great-aunt dies, she is prepared to experience a new aspect of grieving.
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EMANCIPATION
Beyond the Foster Care System: The Future for Teens
By: Betsy Krebs
This book offers brilliant insights into helping disadvantaged teenagers turn their lives around. It is gripping to read, offering very engaging stories of young people struggling to find a place in the adult world.
In Care and After: A Positive Perspective
By: Antonia Simon, Sonia Jackson, and Elaine Chase
Based on research from the Thomas Coram Research Unit, the contributors to this text look at the views and experiences of young people and provide an encouraging outlook of what those in care have the potential to achieve.
Learning to Live: A Black Woman's Journey Beyond Foster Care
By: Theresa Cameron
Theresa struggles to find her way through the maze of adult life, from college and employment to friendship and romance. Throughout it all, the one-time abandoned black baby grapples with questions of her own identity and place in an often inhospitable world.
On Their Own: What Happens to Kids When They Age Out of the Foster Care System
By: Martha Shirk
Foster care is designed to provide for children up until the age of 18, but what happens after that? Shirk and Stangler note in the introduction to their study that in today's society, young people don't tend to reach full maturity until their mid-twenties, and most children leaving foster care aren't even equipped with the basic tools (a high-school diploma, a driver's license or state ID, work experience) the average 18-year-old possesses...
Youth Leaving Foster Care: A Developmental, Research-Based Approach to Practice
By: Wendy B. Smith
A fresh and important contribution to child welfare. For too long, child welfare has been guided by a thin theoretical base. Smith changes that with her thoughtful articulation of the theoretical foundations that explain youths' experience in care. A must-read for social workers and other professionals engaged in the lives of vulnerable young people.
Youth Transitioning From Foster Care
By: Adrienne L. Fernandes
Nearly half of states have laws that explicitly permit the state child welfare system to continue providing foster care for children beyond the age of majority. However, the number of states that actually facilitate youth remaining in care beyond their 18th or 19th birthdays is significantly smaller. While most young people have access to emotional and financial support systems throughout their early adult years, older youth in care and those who age out of care often face obstacles to developing independent living skills and building supports that ease the transition to adulthood.
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FAMILY & OTHER RELATIONSHIPS
A Father Like That (ages 9-12)
By: Charlotte Zolotow
Originally copyrighted in 1971, at a time when fatherless families were becoming a societal issue, the text was most likely intended to be a reassuring, positive message. The handsome paintings depict a contemporary setting, but will today's young boys be consoled by the prospect of being a great dad when they grow up, or is that day too remote to make a difference in a boy's outlook?
Celebrating Families (ages 4-8)
By: Rossmarie Hausherr
Fourteen children from various ethnic groups invite young readers to meet their families. The left-hand side of the double-page spread devoted to each family bears the child's signature and a group portrait, most often in color. The text and accompanying black-and-white photos on the right describe the living arrangement and show family members working and enjoying good times together.
Edith Herself
By: Ellen Howard
Edith must come to terms with her problem and her new life. Set in the 1890s before epilepsy was controlled and understood, this story is told warmly and well. It provides what so many current stories that deal with disability fail to provide a focus on the child rather than the disability.
Families: A Celebration of Diversity, Commitment, and Love (ages 9-12) By: Aylette Jenness
Jenness has taken what began as a photographic exhibition at the Children's Museum in Boston and molded the separate parts into a cohesive unit that celebrates the family in all its diversity. Seventeen multiethnic young people describe their families, including their strengths and weaknesses.
Honor Thy Children: One Family's Journey to Wholeness
By: Molly Fumia
Of Al and Jane Nakatani's three sons, one had been murdered, one had died of AIDS, and the third, Guy, was also dying of that disease. Fumia's probing reveals the dysfunction and homophobia that led to the destruction of this Japanese American family, as well as their triumph over these obstacles even as death approaches.
I know This Much is True
By: Wally Lamb
Somewhere in the recesses of this hefty 912-page tome lurks an honest, moving account of one man's search, denial, and acceptance of self. This is no easy feat considering his grandfather seemed to take parenting tips from the SS and his grandmother was a possible teenage murderess, his stepfather a latent sadist, and his brother, Thomas, a politically motivated psychopath. Not one to break with tradition, Dominick continues the dysfunctional legacy with rape, a failed marriage, a nervous breakdown, SIDS, a car crash, and a racist conspiracy against a coworker just to name a few.
It Can Always Be Worse (ages 4-8)
By: Margot Zemach
The familiar tale of the simple villager whose house was so crowded and noisy, he went to the Rabbi for help. Never has the tale been made into a picture book of such beauty and gusto.
Journey
By: Patricia MacLachlan
Left with their loving but undemonstrative grandparents, Journey and his sister must face the fact that their free-spirited mother is gone forever. The old man's passion, his photographs, and a stray cat provide the common bonds that bring the family together. A tightly focused, carefully composed masterpiece.
Monkey Island
By: Paula Fox
Fox has written a quietly terrifying, wholly compelling novel about the urban homeless, filtered through the experience of an 11-year-old boy. Clay's middle-class existence begins to shred when his art-director father loses his job and eventually, his connection to his wife and child. He leaves without a word one day, and Clay and his pregnant mother end up in a welfare hotel, a place "where people in trouble waited for something better or worse to happen to them." And happen it does, for Clay's mother soon disappears as well, and Clay takes to the streets, to be befriended by two homeless men and reunited with his mother only after great tribulation.
Montana
By: Larry Watson
Watson's novel about a middle-class Montana family torn apart by scandal during the summer of 1948 was awarded the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.
Mothers Who Drive Their Daughters Crazy
By: S. Chohen, E. Cohen
The authors of Mothers Who Drive Their Daughters Crazy, a husband and wife team (she's the psychotherapist; he's the journalist), approach this often difficult dynamic with a sense of drama and the gift of clarity. They created 10 personality categories from clients' stories -The Narcissist, The Yenta, The Smother Mother, The Ostrich, to name a few. "If you can spot your mother in one of these," the Cohens write, "you might be able to gain some objectivity, start seeing the patterns, and watch with a calmer eye."
Mountain Wedding (ages 5-9)
By: Faye Gibbons
Mountain Wedding is a fine children's story of an old-time wedding, with a twist that makes the Brady Bunch seem small in comparison. Mandy Searcy narrates the nuptial ceremony between her mother, who has five children, and Mr. Long, who has seven of his own. The wedding doesn't go as planned-how could it with 12 kids?
Onion Tears
By: Daina Kidd
Kidd sensitively and eloquently conveys the thoughts of a young Vietnamese refugee who has found a new home in Australia with a kindly restaurateur. At the beginning of the book, Nam-Huong is unable to laugh, cry or verbalize her feelings to others; in her own words, she is like the wooden duck given to her by her beloved grandfather, who has recently died No one knows how much she misses him and the other members of her family, with whom she has lost contact. Eventually, an understanding teacher helps Nam-Huong break through her shield of silence and re-experience the pleasures of being alive.
Robert Lives with His Grandparents (ages 4-8)
By: Martha Whittier Hickman
This wooden story presents an African American boy's feelings and apprehensions when he chooses to live with his grandparents rather than his drug-addicted mother. His grandparents spend time with him and obviously love and care for him, but he worries that the kids at school will ridicule him because he doesn't live with a parents.
Sarah, Plain and Tall (ages 9-12)
By: Patricia MacLachlan
In the late 19th century a widowed mid-western farmer with two children Anna and Caleb, advertises for a wife. When Sarah arrives she is homesick for Maine, especially for the ocean which she misses greatly. The children fear that she will not stay, and when she goes off to town alone, young Caleb--whose mother died during childbirth-is stricken with the fear that she has gone for good.
Shadows (ages 4-8)
By: Dennis Haseley
While Jamie's mother is looking for a new job, she sends him to stay with his aunt in West Virginia. Aunt Elena is overly protective, and without the company of his mother and friends the boy feels stifled and lonely. But one day his grandpa appears and, much to his aunt's dismay, shows Jamie how to escape into a world of fantasy using only his hands and a light to cast shadows.
She's Come Undone
By: Wally Lamb
In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40. The troubled product of a stormy marriage, she is already sipping Maalox in grade school. Then her father walks out on her mother, who suffers a nervous collapse, and Dolores moves to her repressive grandmother's house in Rhode Island. By the time she reaches eighth grade, she has only one friend: a boarder who eventually rapes her. Anesthetizing herself with junk food and soap operas, Dolores becomes an obese, isolated young woman who attempts suicide during her first semester in college and spends seven years in a mental institution. Oddly enough, this relentless parade of disasters makes for interesting reading.
The Glass Castle
By: Jeanette Walls
Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover.
The Mother Dance
By: Harriet Lerner
Lerner set out to write a book on parenting, and ended up with a thoughtful and honest book focusing on the experience of being a mother-a woman's experiences, needs, and changes as she travels through the trials and pleasures of pregnancy, birth, power struggles, guilt, anxiety, relationship challenges, sibling struggles, and separation.
The Outside Child
By: Nina Bawden
Even though her friend Plato calls them both "outside children" (children on the "outside" of a family, looking in), 13-year-old Jane has been quite happy living with her two eccentric aunts, and seeing her father when his ship is in port. But one day she notices a picture of a young family in his cabin, and discovers that she has a half-brother and half-sister. Outraged that this secret has been kept from her, she and Plato embark upon a spy mission to locate and meet Jane's mystery family.
The Pinballs
By: Betsey Byars
Three unwanted kids, "pinballs" as wisecracking Carly dubs them, collide in a warm and caring foster home and learn to pin their hopes on each other.
The Relatives Came (ages 4-8)
By: Cynthia Rylant
They came en masse and they came for an extended stay. Their anticipation at seeing kin during their long, long drive and finally hugging them "against their wrinkled Virginia clothes" set the tone for this welcome family reunion, a visit that never wears thin. The relatives are depicted as a support system to help a fatherless family with all the things that need to be done in and around their house.
The Shelter of Each Other
By: Mary Pipher
Psychologist Pipher looks at American culture to explain our problems. This time, she explores the family and what today's antifamily culture is doing to it. She argues that by glamorizing sex, drugs, and violence and regarding children as consumers, our society teaches children inappropriate values.
Why Do I Love These People
By: Po Bronson
Bronson interviewed 700 people, 19 of whom are chronicled here. His book is "about decoding the mystery of family life." The stories center on men and women who lead satisfying lives with their families despite destructive childhoods, people who overcome their impulses to repeat what was inflicted upon them, and those who heal in their own particular way, not conforming to any fashion. There are some relationships rescued from the brink and some people whose lives improved after a much-needed divorce or break from their parents.
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FOSTER CARE, RELATIVE CARE, AND ORPAHAGE PLACEMENT
A Child's Journey Through Placement
By: Vera Fahlberg M.D.
Not only does the author give explanations, activities, & study based back-up, but she also walks you through her chapters with several case studies. This helps the reader to better apply the knowledge they are absorbing.
Building a Home Within: Meeting the Emotional Needs of Children and Youth in Foster Care
By: Toni Vaughn Heineman, Dian Ehrensaft
All children need stable, lasting relationships with caring adults to ensure their healthy emotional, cognitive, and social development. But for children and adolescents in foster care, these essential relationships are often absent. This book presents a proven solution based on over 10 years of groundbreaking work by the Children's Psychotherapy Project (CPP): When young people work with the same therapist for as long as they need to, they'll make better progress toward developing strong, healthy relationships and hope for the future.
Children in Foster Care: The Effects of Foster Parent Characteristics on Anxiety Levels of Children Placed in the Foster Care System
By: Kasi G. Patterson Ph.D
Children involved in the child welfare system typically experience multiple placements during their time with respective Child Protective Service Agencies. Identifying adequate and appropriate placements is often a difficult task, with adequate resources and federal funding decreasing every fiscal year. The task becomes more difficult when the identified child in need of placement has an emotional and/or behavioral disturbance. The current study examined the effect of specific foster parent characteristics on reported anxiety levels of children in foster care. The study involved 16 children and ten foster families across two different forms of foster care, namely traditional foster homes and Proctor homes, which are treatment based foster homes. The results of this study will hopefully fuel additional research on children placed in the foster care system and encourage Child Protective Service Agencies to recruit and select qualified and caring foster parents in effort to help alleviate or reduce the reported levels of anxiety in foster children.
Finding the Right Spot: When kids Can't Live with Their Parents (ages 4-8)
By: Janice Levy
Written for children who are living with anyone other than their parents, this story is narrated by a spirited young girl who is living with Aunt Dane (not her real aunt) for a while, until her mother is able to care for her again.
For You Own Good: A Child's Book About Living in a Foster Home (ages 4-8)
By: Doris Sanford
This book gives very accurate information about what it is like for a child to go to a foster home. It addresses the feelings of confusion, self-blame, loneliness, and hurt that all children in foster care experience. There is an excellent section of foster care facts at the end of the book.
Heads, I Win (ages 9-12)
By: Patricia Hermes
Bailey runs for class president hoping that popularity will secure her place in her current foster home. After a lifetime of being bounced form one foster home to another, Bailey has finally found a place she might like to stay - if they want her. And what better way to know than by winning and proving her worth to her classmates, to her new family, to the social worker and to herself.
I Know This Much is True
By: Wally Lamb
This much is true for sure: Lamb's second novel (after the best selling, Oprah-selected She's Come Undone) is a hefty read. Some may be daunted by its length, its seemingly obsessive inclusion of background details and its many digressions. The topics it unflinchingly explores; mental illness, dysfunctional families, and domestic abuse, are rendered with unsparing candor. But thanks to well-sustained dramatic tension, funky gallows humor and some shocking surprises, this sinuous story of one family's dark secrets and recurring patterns of behavior largely succeeds in its ambitious reach.
Maniac Magee
By: Jerry Spinelli
Maniac Magee is a folk story about a boy, a very excitable boy. One that can outrun dogs, hit a home run off the best pitcher in the neighborhood, tie a knot no one can undo. "Kid's gotta be a maniac," is what the folks in Two Mills say. It's also the story of how this boy, Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee, confronts racism in a small town, tries to find a home where there is none and attempts to soothe tensions between rival factions on the tough side of town.
Raising Our Children's Children
By:
Deborah Doucette-Dudman
Through the use of case scenarios, Doucette-Dudman explores kinship care (primarily care by grandparents) as an alternative to foster care or adoption by strangers. The author herself has adopted a grandchild, and while the book is not her own personal story, the narrative reflects her understanding of the hard choices grandparents make when they step into a primary-care role.
Relatives Raising Children: An Overview of Kinship Care
By: Joseph Crumbley and Robert L. Little
Provides the reader with excellent descriptions of the many issues found in the growing phenomena of family members raising their grandchildren or other relative children...
Somebody's Someone
By: Regina Louise
It's not, unfortunately, an unusual story: Regina Louise was poor, black, illegitimate, and abandoned by her mother to the care of an elderly woman, Big Mama, more concerned with getting to heaven than the health and welfare of her charge. Writing in the idiomatic voice of her childhood self, the author brings her fear, pain, stubbornness, and intelligence up close as she describes her struggles to find someone to love who will love her back. After a brutal beating at the hands of Big Mama's grown foster child, Regina is shuffled from one home to another, angry, uncooperative, vulnerable, finding solace first in fantasies that her mother will rescue her, then in the dream that she will be taken in by a family like those she sees on television. It's supremely ironic that the woman who truly loves her happens to be white and is barred from fostering her. This is a harsh, often brutal, but always compelling memoir, and its very existence is proof of the author's personal triumph in the face of enormous odds.
Temporary Child
By: Edward J. Benzola
On March 3, 1991, Eddie Benzola, who had been raised in a foster home, learned that he had two half-sisters and a half-brother born to his remarried natural father. Upon hearing this news, he contacted one of his sisters and began to piece together his origins and identity...
The Great Gilly Hopkins (ages 9-12)
By: Katherine Paterson
Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all. She has a county-wide reputation for being brash, brilliant, and completely unmanageable. So when she's sent to live with the Trotters - by far the strangest family yet - Gilly decides to put her sharp mind to work. Before long she's devised an elaborate scheme to get her real mother to come rescue her.
The Things I Want Most: The Extraordinary Story of a Boy's Journey to a Family of His Own
By: Richard Miniter
The remarkable story of a couple who risked everything to open their home--and their hearts--to answer an abandoned child's wish.
It was a small note buried in the file of a deeply troubled eleven-year-old boy--a plea for a normal life Rich and Sue Miniter couldn't ignore:
The Things I Want MOST:
A family...
A fishing pole...
A family, The Miniters heard in that simple note the voice of a frightened child who wanted what all children want and need: someone to love who would love them in return.
They Cage the Animals at Night
By: Jennings Michael Birch
One rainy day in Brooklyn, Jennings Michael Burch's mother, too sick to care for him, left him at an orphanage, saying only, "I'll be right back." She never returned. Shuttled through a series of bleak foster homes and institutions, he never remained in any of them long enough to make a friend...
Three Little Words: A Memoir
By: Ashley Rhodes-Courter
Taken from her mother when she was scarcely four years old, Rhodes-Courter spent the next nine years in foster care with “more than a dozen so-called mothers.” “Some were kind,” she acknowledges, “a few were quirky and one . . . was as wicked as a fairy-tale witch.” She names names in this memoir, which is also a searing indictment of an often sadly deficient system of child care...
Toby Lived Here
By: Hilma Wolitzer
When Toby's mother suppresses her grief over the death of Toby's father, she has a breakdown that leaves Toby and her sister in the hands of foster parents.
When the Road Ends
By: Jean Thesman
Mary Jack Jordan, 12, tells this story of the summer she and two other foster children, 14-year-old Adam and a badly abused, nameless 7-year-old called Jane, spend with their foster father's sister, Cecile Bradshaw, in a cabin in rural Washington. What further complicates this story is that Cecile has received serious head injuries in an automobile accident that killed her husband, and the housekeeper hired to care for all of them has run off. Not wishing to return to their unhappy foster home, Mary Jack and Adam conspire to find a way to remain at the cabin...
White Oleander
By: Jane Fitch
Astrid Magnussen, the teenage narrator of Janet Fitch's engrossing first novel, White Oleander, has a mother who is as sharp as a new knife. An uncompromising poet, Ingrid despises weakness and self-pity, telling her daughter that they are descendants of Vikings, savages who fought fiercely to survive. And when one of Ingrid's boyfriends abandons her, she illustrates her point, killing the man with the poison of oleander flowers. This leads to a life sentence in prison, leaving Astrid to teach herself the art of survival in a string of Los Angeles foster homes.
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LGBTQ
Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence
By: Marion
Dane Bauer
Each of these original stories is original, each is by a noted author for young adults, and each honestly portrays its subject and theme--growing up gay or lesbian, or with gay or lesbian parents or friends.
Becoming Bobbie
By: R. J. Stevens
Growing up in the shadow of her fashionable, ladylike mother, Bobbie lives for just three things: cars, music and time with her uncomplicated mechanic father. She doesn't have much need for friends and she loves the cool logic of working on engines - the simple joy of finding the problem and then fixing it. But it's not so easy to fix the problems in her family, and a shattering secret is tearing them apart, sending Bobbie into a spiral of anger and defiance. Moving from school to school as a full-time loner, Bobbie wonders if she'll ever fit in anywhere, especially as uncomfortable feelings begin to surface...
Blackbird
By: Larry Duplechan
Blackbird just wasn't the first Black gay coming out tale; it was—and still is—one of the quirkiest and funniest novels ever read. Duplechan's lyrical, free-floating prose is joyful, even when tackling teen angst and (gasp!) an exorcism.
Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
By: Regina Kunzel
Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners’ rights activism; and the HIV epidemic Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.
Families We Choose
By: Kath Weston
Part of the new series entitled "Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies," this book demands--and deserves--thorough and careful reading. With weighty prose, Weston, an anthropology professor, writes that gays and lesbians, long seen as exiles from kinship ties, are choosing to create their own families. Arguing that these "chosen" families cannot be understood apart from the "straight" families in which gays and lesbians grew up, she draws on interviews to describe gays' relationships with their straight families. Weston places her interpretation in perspective with historical and legal background information and extended quotations from interviewees.
Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (young adult)
By: Ellen Bass
Free Your Mind is the definitive practical guide for gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth and their families, teachers, counselors and friends. For too long, gay youth have wanted to be themselves and to feel good about it, but most have been isolated, afraid, harassed, or worse. Their very existence has been ignored, whispered about, or swept under the rug. But each day more and more lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are standing up, speaking out, breaking down stereotypes, demanding rights and recognition-- shining. In this book, young people share their joy and their pain, their hopes and fears, the formidable obstacles they have faced and overcome, and the exciting opportunities they have discovered.
Funny Boy
By: Shyam Selvadurai
Selvadurai adds the foreign, funny, and unusual in a novel that is as personal as it is political. While growing up in Sri Lanka amid Tamil and Sinhalese conflicts, Arjie, a young boy who likes to play with dolls and girls, observes the social constraints abhorred and perpetuated within his own family and in society at large. Through the details of family life, the intimacies and exchanges, Selvadurai, much like E. M. Forster, reveals truths subtly, with poignancy and grace...
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
By: Kate Bornstein
Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, coming directly to you from the life experiences of a transsexual woman, Gender Outlaw breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed.26 black-and-white illustrations.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
By: James Baldwin
Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology
By: Bennett L. Singer
Growing up Gay, Growing up Lesbian is the first literary anthology geared specifically to gay and lesbian youth. It includes more than fifty coming-of-age stories by established writers and teenagers and has been hailed by writers, educators, activists, booksellers, and the press as an essential resource for young people--and not-so-young people--seeking to understand the gay and lesbian experience.
Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
By: David D. Gilmore
In this cross-cultural study of manhood as an achieved status, the author finds that a culturally sanctioned stress on manliness - on toughness and aggressiveness, stoicism and sexuality - is almost universal, and deeply ingrained in the consciousness of men who otherwise have little in common.
Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India
By: Serena Nanda
This ethnography is a cultural study of the Hijras of India, a religious community of men who dress and act like women. It focuses on how Hijras can be used in the study of gender categories and human sexual variation.
Queeer Theory: An Introduction
By: Annamarie Jagose
The political and academic appropriation of the term queer over the last several years has marked a shift in the study of sexuality from a focus on supposedly essential categories as gay and lesbian to more fluid or queer notions of sexual identity. Yet queer is a category still in the process of formation. In Queer Theory, Annamarie Jagose provides a clear and concise explanation of queer theory, tracing it as part of an intriguing history of same-sex love over the last century.
Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer
By: Riki Wilchins
A one-stop, no-nonsense introduction to the core of postmodern theory, particularly its impact on queer and gender studies. Nationally known gender activist Riki Wilchins combines straightforward prose with concrete examples from LGBT and feminist politics, as well as her own life, to guide the reader through the ideas that have forever altered our understanding of bodies, sex and desire. This is that rare postmodern theory book that combines accessibility, passion, personal experience and applied politics, noting at every turn why these ideas matter and how they can affect your daily life.
Revolutionary Voices
By: Amy Sonnie
Invisible. Unheard. Alone. Chilling words but apt to describe the isolation and alienation of queer youth. In silence and fear they move from childhood memories of repression or violence to the unknown, unmentored, landscape of queer adulthood, their voices stilled or ignored. No longer. Revolutionary Voices celebrates the hues and harmonies of the future of gay and lesbian society, presenting not a collection of stories but a collection of experiences, ideas, dreams, and fantasies expressed through prose, poetry, artwork, letters, diaries, and performance pieces.
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970
By: John D' Emilio
With thorough documentation of the oppression of homosexuals and biographical sketches of the lesbian and gay heroes who helped the contemporary gay culture to emerge, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities supplies the definitive analysis of the homophile movement in the U.S. from 1940 to 1970.
Speaking Out: LGBTQ Youth Stand Up (young adult)
By: Steve Berman
Speaking Out features stories for and about LGBT and Q teens by fresh voices and noted authors in the field of young adult literature. These are inspiring stories of overcoming adversity (against intolerance and homophobia) and experiencing life after "coming out." Queer teens need tales of what might happen next in their lives, and editor Steve Berman showcases a diversity of events, challenges, and, especially, triumphs.
The Trouble with Normal
By: Michael Warner
Michael Warner, one of our most brilliant social critics, argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are bad not just for the gays but for everyone. In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.
Transgender History
By: Susan Stryker
Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
By:
Julia Serano
With her first full-length book, biologist, writer and musician Serano positions herself as a Betty Friedan of the transsexual community. Making a case that trans discrimination is steeped in sexism and that trans activism is a feminist movement, Serano delivers a series of articulate, compelling and provocative essays that unmask many of the misconceptions surrounding transsexualism, gender and feminism. Where most books on the topic focus either on first-person accounts or clinical observations, Serano approaches her topic from multiple angles.
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POVERTY & SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLASS
A Chair for My Mother (ages 4-8)
By: Vera B. Williams
After a fire destroys their home and possessions, Rosa, her mother, and grandmother save and save until they can afford to buy one big, comfortable chair that all three of them can enjoy. After their home is destroyed by a fire, Rosa, her mother and grandmother save their coins to buy a really comfortable chair for all to enjoy.
At the Crossroads (ages 4-8)
By: Rachel Isadora
The children of a South African village eagerly gather at the crossroads to welcome their fathers, who have been away for months working in the mines. The children wait, but the men don't come. So the children keep waiting. And waiting. They wait all through the night, until the dawn brings both the day and the longed-for loved ones.
Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools
By: Lois Weis and Michelle Fine
This book is a research based look at the ways American schools tend to discourage academic excellence in students from underrepresented groups. The book is an edited volume containing chapters from respected multicultural educators concerned with increasing academic access and opportunity among these underrepresented groups. By not focusing strictly on issues affecting Black and Latino/a students, Beyond Silenced Voices offers critiques that are relevant to a number of groups, include Asian, gay, and female students.
Blaming the Victim
By: William Ryan
The classic work that refutes the lies we tell ourselves about race, poverty and the poor. Here are three myths about poverty in America: Minority children perform poorly in school because they are “culturally deprived.” African-Americans are handicapped by a family structure that is typically unstable and matriarchal. Poor people suffer from bad health because of ignorance and lack of interest in proper health care. Blaming the Victim was the first book to identify these truisms as part of the system of denial that even the best intentioned Americans have constructed around the unpalatable realities of race and class. Originally published in 1970, William Ryan's groundbreaking and exhaustively researched work challenges both liberal and conservative assumptions, serving up a devastating critique of the mindset that causes us to blame the poor for their poverty and the powerless for their powerlessness.
By The Dawn's Early Light (ages 4-8)
By: Karen Ackerman
When Mom leaves for work, Rachel and her little brother are just eating dinner. By bedtime, they know their mom is hard at work in the factory. Their special time comes very early in the morning, when Rachel hears Mom come home. That's when she and Josh spend a sleepy, loving morning with their mother, waiting for the dawn's early light.
Cat Running (ages 9-11)
By: Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Cat loves running and she doesn't only do it because it is fun for her, she uses it as a way to deal with or run away from her problems. This year, a new boy came to their school. His name is Zane and he's an "okie" a person who is not wealthy or someone who is dirty and uneducated. Cat has seen him run before and she was amazed at how fast this kid was. She decided that at this year's race, she was going to need all the help she could get to win once more. Cat decided to ask her father if she could wear pants this year just like every other girl would be, but of course her father was opposed to it. This made Cat furious and she decided not to run in the race at all. Zane and Cat didn't get along, however, cat did become very good friends with Zane's little sister, Sammy...
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
By: Paul Fussell
This best selling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark as Fussell shows us how our status is revealed by everything we do, say, and own. He describes the houses, objects, artifacts, speech, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from the top to the bottom and everybody -- you'll surely recognize yourself -- in between.
Class and News
By: Don Heider
Heider has brought together some excellent current scholarship explicating the very concept of class in America, how news influences people's ideas about class and what people believe and how they act, the way meaning is constructed in news, and how media operate to create or reinforce social values.
Created Equal: Reading and Writing About Class in America
By: Benjamin DeMott
This collection of interviews, personal testimonies, autobiographical narratives, stories, essays, and political, historical, and sociological studies centers on the issues of social class in America.
Ethnic America: Readings in Race, Class, and Gender
By: Eric Vega, Wayne Maeda, Rita Cameron and Gregory Mark
Takes an interdisciplinary approach to discussing race, class, and gender issues in the United States. Covering dysfunctions, theory, and current events, this book is a compilation of recent articles in the field of Ethnic America. Specific articles dealing with the history of African-American, Asian Pacific Red Indians, Native Americans, and Latinos provides a grounding for students to analyze propositions raised in more traditional sociology and anthropology classes. Following each section is a set of questions that help the reader to structure their understanding of race, class, and gender issues in the United States. These questions target two distinct audiences: students of Ethnic Studies and social justice activities. Articles covering concepts such as ethnic groups, racism, color blindness, and inter-sectionality are presented in an easy-to-understand format.
Families in Poverty
By: Karen Seccombe, Susan G. Fergusen
Poverty is a social problem, and finding solutions requires us to look closely at our society, laws and social institutions. Families in Poverty brings together the best and most recent quantitative and qualitative data to examine poverty among U.S. families, the problems poor families face, and discusses how solutions to poverty do exist.
Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform
By: Sharon Hays
Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society.
Fly Away Home (ages 4-8)
By: Eve Bunting
A homeless boy who lives in an airport with his father, moving from terminal to terminal trying not to be noticed, is given hope when a trapped bird finally finds its freedom.
Growing Up in Coal Country
By: Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The story that emerges is not just a story of long hours, little pay, and hazardous working conditions; it is also the uniquely American story of immigrant families working together to make a new life for themselves. It is a story of hardship and sacrifice, yet also of triumph and the fulfillment of hopes and dreams...
Kids Having Kids: Economic Costs and Social Consequences of Teen Pregnancy
By: Saul D. Hoffman and Rebecca A. Maynard
In 1997, Kids Having Kids was the first comprehensive effort to identify the consequences of teen childbearing for the mothers, the fathers, the children, and our society. Rather than simply comparing teen mothers with their childless counterparts, the assembled researchers achieved a new methodological sophistication, seeking to isolate the birth itself from the mother s circumstances and thus discover its true costs. This updated second edition features a new chapter evaluating teen pregnancy interventions, along with revised and updated versions of most first edition chapter.
Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper Middle Class
By: Michele Lamont
Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class—the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
By: Barbara Ehrenreich
Acclaimed as an instant classic upon publication, Nickel and Dimed has sold more than 1.5 million copies and become a staple of classroom reading. Chosen for “one book” initiatives across the country, it has fueled nationwide campaigns for a living wage. Funny, poignant, and passionate, this revelatory firsthand account of life in low-wage America—the story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate—has become an essential part of the nation’s political discourse.
Random Family
By: Adriane Nicole LeBlanc
Politicians rail about welfare queens, crack babies and deadbeat dads, but what do they know about the real struggle it takes to survive being poor? Journalist LeBlanc spent some 10 years researching and interviewing one extended family-mother Lourdes, daughter Jessica, daughter-in-law Coco and all their boyfriends, children and in-laws-from the Bronx to Troy, N.Y., in and out of public housing, emergency rooms, prisons and courtrooms. LeBlanc's close listening produced this extraordinary book, a rare look at the world from the subjects' point of view. Readers learn that prison is just an extension of the neighborhood, a place most men enter and a rare few leave. They learn the realities of welfare: the myriad of misdemeanors that trigger reduction or termination of benefits, only compounding a desperate situation. They see teenaged drug dealers with incredible organizational and financial skills, 13-year-old girls having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, older women reminiscing about the "heavenly time" they spent in a public hospital's psychiatric ward and incarcerated men who find life's first peace and quiet in solitary confinement. More than anything, LeBlanc shows how demanding poverty is.
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
By: Jonathan Kozol
Kozol believes that children from poor families are cheated out of a future by grossly under equipped, understaffed and under funded schools in U.S. inner cities and less affluent suburbs. The schools he visited between 1988 and 1990--in burnt-out Camden, N.J., Washington, D.C., New York's South Bronx, Chicago's South Side, San Antonio, Tex., and East St. Louis, Mo., awash in toxic fumes--were "95 to 99 percent nonwhite." Kozol found that racial segregation has intensified since 1954. Even in the suburbs, he charges, the slotting of minority children into lower "tracks" sets up a differential, two-tier system that diminishes poor children's horizons and aspirations.
The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege
By: Kriby Moss
What is it like to be white, poor, and socially marginalized while, at the same time, surrounded by the glowing assumption of racial privilege? Kirby Moss, an African American anthropologist and journalist, goes back to his hometown in the Midwest to examine ironies of social class in the lives of poor whites.
The Hidden Injuries of Class
By: Richard Sennett, Jonathan Cobb
The authors conclude that in the games of hierarchical respect, no class can emerge the victor; and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity. Examining personal feelings in terms of a totality of human relations, and looking beyond the struggle for economic survival, The Hidden Injuries of Class takes an important step forward in the sociological critique of everyday life...
The Rag Coat (ages 4-8)
By: Lauren A. Mills
With paintings that capture all the beauty of Appalachia in authentic detail, this tender story about a resourceful mountain girl's special coat will touch readers with its affirming message of love and friendship...
The Working Poor
By: David K. Shipler
They perform labor essential to America’s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian--men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right–that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers compelling portraits of employers struggling against razor-thin profits and competition from abroad.
Tight Times (ages 4-8)
By: Barbara Shook Hazen
A small boy, not allowed to have a dog because times are tight, finds a starving kitten in a trash can on the same day his father loses his job.
Uncle Willy and the Soup Kitchen
By: Dyanne DiSalvo-Ryan
A straightforward fictional view of an urban soup kitchen, as observed by a boy visiting it with his `Uncle Willie,' who works there every day....The difficult lives of those fed (including children)-as well as the friendly, non intrusive attitude of the kitchen workers toward them-are presented sensitively but without sentimentality.
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
By: Annette Lareau
Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today.
Where We Stand: Class Matters
By: Bell Hooks
Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.
White Trash: Race and Class in America
By: Matt Way, Annalee Newitz
This collection is devoted to exploring stereotypes about the social conditions of poor whites in the United States and comparing these stereotypes with the social reality, unmasking the racial and class assumptions behind the term 'white trash'.
Who Rules America? Power and Politics
By: William G. Domhoff
By providing empirical evidence for his argument, Domhoff encourages students to think critically about the power structure in American society and its implications for our democracy.
Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anit-Poverty Policy
By: Martin Gilens
Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilen's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor.
Working People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
By: Studs Tekel
Studs Terkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happiness on the job. Once again, Terkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives....
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SELF HELP
A Teen Foster Adoption Lifebook: For When I'm Famous
By: Beth O'Malley
"For When I'm Famous" taps into every teen's dream---to be rich and famous. So with money for their autobiography as the motivator, this workbook eases into past life experiences and relationships.
Everyone Wins! Cooperative Games and Activities
By: Sambhova, Josette Lavmour
This new edition of the best-selling Parent Choice Award-winner Everyone Wins! collects more than 150 cooperative games and activities for enhancing conflict resolution and communication skills and building self-esteem.
Healing the Shame That Binds You
By: John Bradshaw
Shame is the motivator behind our toxic behaviors: the compulsion, co-dependency, addiction and drive to superachieve that breaks down the family and destroys personal lives. This book has helped millions identify their personal shame, understand the underlying reasons for it, address these root causes and release themselves from the shame that binds them to their past failures.
Healing the Trauma of Domestic Violence: A Workbook for Women
By: Edward S. Kubany, Mari A. McCaig, and Janet R. Laconsay
Domestic violence experts offer the first-ever post-traumatic stress disorder treatment approach to help abused women overcome the trauma they have endured and regain control of their lives. It delves into specific problems associated with PTSD. Worksheets reinforce the messages in the text. In addition to addressing the symptoms of PTSD, the book offers readers strategies they can employ when and if a confrontation with the abusive partner becomes necessary.
Healing Your Emotional Self: A Powerful Program to Help You Raise Your Self Esteem, Quiet Your Inner Critic, and Overcome Your Shame
By: Beverly Engel
Emotionally abusive parents are indeed toxic parents, and they cause significant damage to their children's self-esteem, self-image, and body image. In this remarkable book, Beverly Engel shares her powerful Mirror Therapy program for helping adult survivors to overcome their shame and self-criticism, become more compassionate and accepting of themselves, and create a more positive self-image.
How to Give Your Child a Great Self-Image
By: Debora Phillips and Fred Bernstein
Psychologist and parent Deborah Phillps shares her proven strategies for giving children the emotional boosters that make the difference between a timid, self-defeating child and one who is comfortable in the world around him. Positive, reassuring and practical, How to Give Your Child a Great Self-Image offers essential advice to every parent.
My Foster Care Journey: A Foster/Adoption Lifebook
By: Beth O'Malley
Designed by an adult adoptee, this 27-page, coil bound lifebook allows you to work quickly as you capture vital information. The animated pages hold the child's interest and is written to complement any permanent goal (i.e.guardianship, return home, adoption).
My Lifebook Journal: A Workbook for Children in Foster Care
By: Therese Accinelli
The simple activities in My Lifebook Journal offer children the tools they need to adjust to their new situation in a healthy way. Using the worksheets in this book, kids can journal about their positive experiences and memories, learn to develop a strong sense of self, identify the people they can rely on, and learn coping skills for dealing with feelings of anger and sadness. Writing down and exploring their thoughts and feelings in just a few minutes each day can help children better understand themselves and their biological and foster families. The resiliency and self-confidence that these activities develop will help children handle not only the transition into foster care, but also the many positive changes in their lives still to come...
Necessary Losses
By: Judith ViorstIn
Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst turns her considerable talents to a serious and far-reaching subject: how we grow and change through the losses that are an inevitable and necessary part of life. She argues persuasively that through the loss of our mothers' protection, the loss of the impossible expectations we bring to relationships, the loss of our younger selves, and the loss of our loved ones through separation and death, we gain deeper perspective, true maturity, and fuller wisdom about life. She has written a book that is both life affirming and life changing.
School Powers: Strategies for Succeeding in School (5th grade and up)
By: Jeanne Shay Schumann
Step-by-step instructions, practical advice, and insider tips from real students cover every conceivable topic, from how to get organized and create a study space to how to take notes, write papers, prepare speeches, follow directions, set goals, handle long-range assignments, and much more. Kids and teens learn proven ways to be better readers, spellers, and writers, master new vocabulary, remember what they study, prepare for tests, and conquer test anxiety—and those are just for starters.
Surviving Foster Care and Making it Work for You
By: Tanya Cooper
Tanya is a former foster child who was in foster care from five years old to twenty-one years old. Surviving abandonment, group homes, sibling separation and sexual abuse, Tanya discovered if you protect your sanity, you can survive anything! After years of therapy and graduating from NYU, she wanted to share her experience so that no teen would hurt themselves and be able to recognize their potential, before they age out! This book is from her personal experiences.
The Courage to Heal Workbook: A Guide for Women and Men Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
By: Laura Davis
In this groundbreaking companion to The Courage to Heal, Laura Davis offers an inspiring, in-depth workbook that speaks to all women and men healing from the effects of child sexual abuse. The combination of checklists, writing and art Projects, open-ended questions and activities expertly guides the survivor through the healing process.
The Dance of Anger
By: Harriet Lerner
While anger deserves our attention and respect, women still learn to silence our anger, to deny it entirely, or to vent it in a way that leaves us feeling helpless and powerless. In this engaging and eminently wise book, Dr. Lerner teaches women to identify the true sources of our anger and to use anger as a powerful vehicle for creating lasting change.
The Dance of Deception
By: Harriet Lerner
We all "do deception", often with the intention to protect ourselves and the relationships we depend on. The Dance of Deception unravels the ways (and whys) that women show the false and hide the real -- even to our own selves. We see how relationships are affected by lying and faking, by silence and pretending and by brave -- but misguided -- efforts to tell the truth...
The Self-Esteem Workbook
By: Glenn R. Schiraldi
The Self-Esteem Workbook is based on the author's original new research, which has shown that self-esteem can be significantly improved through the use of self-help materials. Now psychologist and health educator Glenn Schiraldi has shaped these tested resources into a comprehensive, self-directed program that guides readers through twenty essential skill-building activities, each focused on developing a crucial component of healthy self-esteem.
You Mean I Don't Have to Feel This Way?
By: Colette Dowling
Colette Dowling watched depression destroy her husband's life and leap to the next generation to nearly destroy her daughter's--until dramatic help was found. Now her ground-breaking book offer the same lifesaving help to the millions who still suffer depression and related disorders--which include panic, anxiety, phobias, PMS, alcohol and drug abuse, bulimia, migraine, and obesity. You Mean I Don't Have To Feel This Way? documents the latest research that links depression and related disorders to a physical cause and shows why willpower, understanding, and psychotherapy so often fail to work. It explains the state-of-the-art medical treatments that can bring about dramatic improvement--and often full recovery--within weeks.
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THE COURT AND FOSTER CARE SYSTEM
Assessing the Long Term Effects of Foster Care: A Research Synthesis
By: Ethomas McDonald, Reva Allen, Alex Westerfelt, Irving Piliavin
What lasting impact has foster care had on the adult lives of former foster children? Noting how trends in expectations and outcomes in foster care have changed over the past 30 years, this comprehensive and critical review of the impact foster care has had on children provides a framework for the critical assessment of trends in programs and policies; identifies what is known and not known concerning the impact of foster care; and offers recommendations for future data collection and research, as well as program and policy development. It is a welcome addition to the literature for program administrators, policymakers, and researchers in the child welfare field.
Beyond the Best Interest of the Child
By: Joseph Goldstein, Anna Frued, Albert J. Solnit
Traditionally, the law has had a presumption in favor of biological parents in disputes with other people. In many states today, unless a parent has abandoned a child or been declared to be "unfit" to raise the child, the rights of biological parents are all but inviolate. In 1973 Beyond the Best Interests of the Child challenged this biological emphasis. Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit argued that whether or not the psychological parent was biologically related to the child or not, courts should preserve this bond because normal development depends on its continuity. They also stressed that for a child, being caught up in a custody battle is a psychological emergency. Since harm has already been done and the child is still at risk, the best the courts can do is resolve matters quickly. Above all, judges and lawyers should base their decisions on the child's immature sense of time and steady need for a continuing relationship with the person who has provided ongoing, loving care.
Child Abuse and the Legal System
By: Inger Sagatun and Judge Leonard Edwards
This ground-breaking text examines the legal contexts in which child abuse can be handled, including the criminal, juvenile, domestic relations, and civil courts. The authors focus on the legal rules in each type of proceeding and the ways in which the law has changed to accommodate the special needs of children in the last fifteen years. Case studies provide examples and help identify the most important issues of child abuse facing the legal system. Child abuse is now a major part of the American legal landscape, involving not only the courts but also the law enforcement and child protection agencies.
Child Protection in America: Past Present, & Future
By: John E.B. Myers
Child abuse and neglect are intractable problems exacting a terrible toll on children and rending the very fabric of our society. What can be done to reduce the suffering? If there were simple solutions to abuse and neglect they would have been discovered long ago. There are no easy answers, but in this vivid history of child protection in America, John E.B. Myers introduces realistic policies that will reduce maltreatment and strengthen the system that protects our children.
Child Welfare and Family Services: Policies and Practice
By: Susan Whitelaw Downs, Ernestine Moore, Emily Jean McFadden and Lela B. Costin
A new chapter on child welfare practice, including an expanded treatment of foster care, provides a foundation for social work interventions with children. In addition, new and updated information covers topics such as; child welfare issues with immigrant families, child outcome measurements, forensic interviewing, advocacy, court documentation, federal legislation, child welfare in a global context, cultural competence, protective/preventive services, day care/child development programs, income security, kinship care, family preservation, and adoption.
From the Eye of the Storm: The Experiences of a Child Welfare Worker
By: Cynthia Crosson-Tower
We teach our students the theory and skills to prepare them for social work practice; now with From the Eye of the Storm , we can give them a glimpse of what the life of a social worker is actually like. Reading more like a novel than a textbook, From the Eye of the Storm's first-person account invites the students into the life of a typical child welfare worker who has gone on to teach and write in the field. References are also made to practices of the past and present so that the student can see how the system has changed.
Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift and the Adoption Alternative
By: Elizabeth Bartholet
A disturbing look at how the lives of Americas modern-day orphans are sacrificed for the often unrealistic goal of keeping troubled families together. Bartholet (Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting, 1993), an expert on family law and an adoptive mother herself, traces the historical, political, and cultural reasons why battered and neglected children are far more likely to spend years in foster limbo, or be sent back to abusive homes, than to be adopted by loving families. The author charges that despite recent legislation that bars race as a factor, everyone from private foundation administrators to judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats continues to be guided by the notion that children should be cared for by relatives, or adopted by families who look like them.
On Trial, America's Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children
By: Dziech, Schudson
This book, the first to examine the experience of child victims & their families who attempt to seek justice in America's courts, offers practical reforms that would bring greater sensitivity & justice to the legal process. Reviewing American legal history & the equivocal treatment of children & sex crimes, Dziech & Schudson explain how current courtroom procedures often fail to acknowledge a child's abilities & needs, & how child witnesses are often re-victimized by the legal system that is supposed to help them. They argue that there is no justification for subjecting abused children to a second round of trauma -- in court.
Orphans of the Living: Stories of American's Children in Foster Care
By: Jennifer Toth
For this eye-opening look at how America cares for its abused and neglected children, Toth traveled to foster-care homes, orphanages, and juvenile detention centers to record the poignant, often heroic voices of youngsters trying to survive in an overburdened system.
Somebody Else's Children
By: Jill Wolfson
With the narrative force of an epic novel and the urgency of first-rate investigative journalism, this important book delves into the daily workings and life-or-death decisions of a typical American family court system. It provides an intimate look at the lives of the parents and children whose fate it decides. A must for social workers and social work students, attorneys, judges, foster parents, law students, child advocates, teachers, journalists and anyone who cares about our nation's children.
The Heart Knows Something's Different: Teenage Voices From the Foster Care System
By: Youth Communication
There are more than 450,000 children living in foster care. The Heart Knows Something Different collects over three dozen personal narratives by young writers, ages 15 to 20, and provides an insider's account of growing up in "the system." It takes us into a world largely hidden from public view, and attests to the mix of pain and fear, and sometimes hope, and sometimes even happiness that the foster care experience involves.
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
By: Nina BernsteinIIn
In
1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system.
Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children At Risk: A Caseworker's Story
By: Marc Parent
Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book.
Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect
By: Cynthia Crosson-Tower
The author covers the history of child welfare, gives an overview of functional and dysfunctional families, and contrasts healthy child development with development hampered by abuse and neglect. Child Abuse and Neglect explains case management procedures and focuses on how various professionals become involved in the child protection process and how treatment is undertaken. The text concludes with a discussion of prevention and a consideration of the future.
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