Turmoil to turning points

Speaking from the trenches, Richard Kagan offers hope to all those who want to help high-risk children and their families. Turmoil to Turning Points discusses principles and strategies that practitioners can use to guide their work. These include engaging parents of children in placement, mapping family resources, identifying split messages children hear from their family and understanding their ensuing struggle, developing centering messages to link the children with their family, mobilizing supportive networks and creating safety plans, fostering attachments, and making visits and review conferences constructive times for change. Dr. Kagan stresses that permanency work begins with respect for a family's strengths and struggles to survive. However, since not every family is destined to live "happily ever after," he discusses back-up plans for children who cannot go back home. The book closes with a look at what can be done to improve child and family services, how we can make the system work for children, families, and our communities, and how practitioners can touch a family's pain without becoming traumatized themselves.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Mental Health. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.