1 SW 625: Interpersonal Practice with Children and Youth Instructor: Mary C. Ruffolo, Ph.D., LMSW SSW Office: Room 2726 SSW Telephone: 734-936-4799 E-mail address: [email protected] Credits: 3 PreReq: INTP 521 Class Meets on Thursdays from 2:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. in SSW Room 2752. Course Description: This course will examine practice theories and techniques for working directly with children, adolescents, and their caretakers. This course will emphasize evidence-based interventions that address diverse groups of children or adolescents within their social contexts (e.g., peer group, school, family, neighborhood). Special attention will be given to issues of diversity as it relates to building therapeutic relationships and intervening with children, adolescents and their families. The interaction between environmental risk factors, protective factors, promotive and developmental factors as they contribute to coping, resiliency, and disorder, as well as how these might vary by child or adolescent diversity factors, such as race, ethnicity, disadvantage, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity and culture will also be covered. Course Content: This course will present prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation models appropriate to interpersonal practice with children, youth and their families in a variety of contexts. Content will focus on the early phases of intervention, including barriers to engagement that may result from client-worker differences, involuntary participation on the part of the child, youth, or family, and factors external to the client-worker relationship, such as policy or institutional decisions that may influence or shape the therapeutic relationship. Since the intervention strategies taught in this course rely significantly on the social worker as a critical component of the change process, attention will be paid to the understanding of self as an instrument in the change process. A variety of evidence-based interventions for engaging children, youth, and their families (or other caretaking adults such as foster parents) will be presented. Assessment content will emphasize client and caretaker strengths and resources as well as risks to child or youth well-being that may result from internal or external vulnerabilities caused by trauma, deprivation, discrimination, separation and loss, developmental disability, and physical and mental illness. Particular attention will be paid to cultural, social, and economic factors that influence client functioning or the worker's ability to accurately assess the child, youth, or family. These assessments include attention to life-threatening problems such as addictions, suicidal ideation, and interpersonal violence. Content on intervention planning will assist students in selecting interventions which are matched with client problems across diverse populations, cultural backgrounds, socio-political contexts, and available resources. These interventions will be based on a thorough assessment,2 appropriate to the child's or adolescent's situation, and sensitive to and compatible with the child/adolescent's and family's expressed needs, goals, circumstances, values, and beliefs. Summary descriptions of developmental stages (i.e. infancy, toddlerhood, preschool age, school age, and adolescence) will be presented in terms of developmental characteristics and milestones, salient developmental challenges, and themes such as self-esteem and the development of peer relationships. Helping parents or other caretaking adults to understand the child's or youth's issues or behavior in developmental terms will also be discussed. A range of evidence-based intervention approaches will be presented such as cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral therapy, and parent management training. Promising practices for children and adolescents across child serving settings will also be reviewed. The use of play therapy in working with young children and children who have been traumatized will be explored. Since work with children and youth almost always requires multiple intervention modalities, attention will be given to creating effective intervention plans through the integration of different modalities. Those intervention methods that have been empirically demonstrated to be effective will be given particular emphasis. Methods for monitoring and evaluating interventions will also be discussed and demonstrated in this course. Course Objectives: Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: 1. Understand and address the impact of diversity (including ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation) of children, adolescents and their families and the social worker on practice process and outcomes. 2. Describe and apply a number of assessment procedures (e.g. direct observation of or interviews with the client, parent or caretaker, and collateral contacts with teachers, caseworkers, or other professionals) that identify internal and external risk protective and promotive factors that may affect children and adolescents. 3. Describe the primary developmental tasks and characteristics of childhood and adolescence as they relate to the selection and implementation of developmentally and culturally appropriate techniques for engaging and treating children and adolescents. 4. Identify the ways in which continuity or disruption in primary care relationships may impact children, adolescents, and the therapeutic relationship. 5. Engage in an assessment process that includes gathering information on the risk, protective and promotive factors at the intrapersonal, family, peer group, school and neighborhood levels in order to formulate and understanding of the child/adolescent's presenting problems and circumstances. 6. Implement evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies (e.g. cognitive behavioral interventions, parent management training) that are compatible with child/adolescent and family or caretaker goals, needs, circumstances, culture, and values. 7. Develop intervention skills in working with children, adolescents and their families. 8. Monitor and evaluate interventions with regard to: effectiveness, sensitivity to diversity factors; impact of child/adolescent' and families' social identities on their experience of power and