Direct Treatment of Children in the Family and Children's Agency: Toward an Integrated Practice

Publication Date: December 1980

Publisher: Jewish Communal Service Association of North America

Author(s): Jerome M. Goldsmith; Judith Lang

Research Area: Social conditions

Keywords: Jewish Organizations; Social Work; Youth

Type: Report

Coverage: United States

Abstract:

Our commitment to a merged practice has deprived us of the comfort of selection of modality and client-unit based on training, bias, or agency mission and setting. It has, as we have illustrated, forced us to select criteria for more appropriate clinical dispositions geared to achieving maximum growth both for the child and for the milieu in which he thrives—most often, his family system. We are attempting no longer to cling to either the child as foreground, or the family as foreground. It is almost as if we have lost a simpler day of more automatic clinical choices, of clear preferred modalities. Now we have to struggle, be more creative, and accept ambiguity and uncertainty.

In Journal of Jewish Communal Service, v.57 no.2, Winter 1980.