Short description:

This resource offers counseling strategies to promote adolescents' overlooked strengths and create healthy alternatives to problem behaviors such as bullying, drug use, violence, and promiscuity.

Long description:

"An eye-opening and heart-opening book."
-Bonnie Benard, Senior Program Associate, WestEd

Identify and promote overlooked strengths to cultivate resilience.

Now more than ever, counselors, teachers, community youth workers, and parents are striving to prevent individual and school-wide tragedy before it happens. Critical to the success of their efforts is a deep respect for the adolescent experience. In this book, author and social worker Michael Ungar takes a fresh, hopeful approach to challenging youth by looking beyond the surface of "bad" behaviors to understand them as ways of coping with life's adversities.

Strengths-Based Counseling With At-Risk Youth provides the tools both to understand and access strengths buried beneath problem behaviors. It offers specific, effective strategies in working with adolescents to construct positive identities and realistic action plans. Features include

• Six strategies for youth engagement, covering common problem behaviors such as drug use, violence, delinquency, and promiscuity
• An entire chapter on bullying
• An abundance of real-life examples and counseling narratives
• A Resilient Youth Strengths Inventory to assess resilience and identify areas that need strengthening

Sincere application of Ungar's compassionate and open-minded strategies is sure to transform the lives of countless adolescents in need, and the institutions that serve them.

?Offers concrete examples regarding questioning and building rapport that are very helpful to professionals and parents faced with (re)connecting and helping youth.?

Table of Contents:

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1. Surviving and Thriving
The Many Ways Youth Survive
Three Survival Strategies, Three Identities
Power and Self-Definition
Substitution as Intervention
Narrative Interventions
Powerful Alternatives
Chapter 2. Three Identities: Pandas, Chameleons, and Leopards
The Stuck Panda
The Uncertain Chameleon
The Demanding Leopard
Pegs and Holes
Chapter 3. Six Strategies for Nurturing Resilience
Overview of the Six Strategies
Paths to Resilience: Conventional and Unconventional
Strategy 1: Hear Their Truth
Chapter 4. From Truth to Action: Implementing Strategies Two Through Five
Strategy 2: Help Youth Look Critically at Their Behavior
Strategy 3: Create Opportunities That Fit With What Youth Say They Need
Strategy 4: Speak In Ways Youth Will Hear and Respect
Strategy 5: Find the Difference That Counts the Most
Chapter 5. The Many Expressions of Youth Resilience
Strategy 6: Substitute Rather Than Suppress
Substitutions for Drug Use
Substitutions for Other At-Risk Behaviors
The Many Expressions of Resilience
Chapter 6. A New Way to Look at Bullying
Bullying as Coping: Jake
Bullying and the Three Identities
Providing Opportunities for Adaptation
Substitutions for Bullies
Substitutions for Victims
Chapter 7. Assessing Resilience
The Resilient Youth Strengths Inventory
Evaluating Fairly
Chapter 8. Translating the Results of the Resilient Youth Strengths Inventory
Pandas Shoot
Chameleons Score
Leopards Win
Using Results to Inform Our Efforts
Conclusion: The Need for Change
References
Index