Families in Community Settings

This unique new volume explores how communities can best address families'needs. Families in Community Settings provides an ecological view of families, focusing on the implications that programs and policies developed and implemented by community schools, employers, community health and mental health organizations, and social welfare agencies have on family life. Noted scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, education, and social welfare share a wealth of concepts, including effective strategies that communities can use for prevention and intervention with families. Chapters examine such timely topics as changes in corporate responses to families, homelessness and families, the combination of informal support with formal services for families with elderly parents, early childhood programs and developing programs that are sensitive to ethnic families, relations between families and schools, community support systems and the prevention of child abuse and neglect, and new welfare reform policies. This exciting volume, with its many implications for improving family life, will be of interest to a broad range of professionals in the fields of social work/social welfare, child and family studies, community psychology, and community health.