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Periodically Libby Colman will review books that are
beneficial to CASAs as they work with their children. The books can be
checked out at the SFCASA office.
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American
Childhoods |
Joseph E. Illick is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. We knew that he taught a course on the History of Childhood when he came to our training, because our own Case Supervisor, Maya Durrett, had taken it while she was an undergraduate. Now we see the fruits of his labors in book form, as American Childhoods. It will immediately go into our library and onto our reading lists as a valuable resource for volunteers.
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Solomon's
Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away |
Solomon's Sword is uniquely useful for CASA volunteers in training, but will also be fascinating reading for anyone who has ever been an active volunteer. Michael Shapiro is a journalist rather than an attorney or social worker or psychologist. He had not had experience with the dependency court prior to his research for this project, so he comes to the project with a fresh but well informed point of view. He presents two specific cases, one from Connecticut and the other from Chicago, and includes very readable chapters that cover the history of child welfare practices and policies.
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Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children |
Are you looking for a really clear, well-written and well-informed book about violence in children? Then this is the book to read.
Jonathan Kellerman is a psychologist who has become a well-known novelist, specializing in crime stories. He knows kids like these, from professional experience. He has strong opinions, and he expresses them clearly. He is not afraid to talk about evil. He can use a formal diagnostic term, but also stay in touch with lived, human experience.
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down:
A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures |
Thanks to SFCASA Volunteers Alan Burkett and Mary McAllister for recommending one of the finest books I have read in recent years: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Mary wrote: “This is the true story of a Hmong child who was caught in the middle of the American medical system and her culture. Its morale is that one culture cannot judge what’s best for another culture. It is extremely well-written and quite non-judgmental of everyone involved.”
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The
Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do |
Lynn Ponton is a psychiatrist at the University of California Medical
Center at San Francisco. Her career has been spent helping distressed
teens and their families. She is particularly interested in risk-taking
behaviors and why young people are so fascinated with them. The Romance
of Risk presents the stories of thirteen of her patients, all teenagers
who were doing dangerous things, including running away, cutting, starving,
drinking, taking drugs, fighting, and having unprotected sex. Most of
the young people learned to understand why they were taking such unhealthy
risks and started living safer lives. Many of them worked out the troubles
they had been having in their relationships with their parents.
MORE
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Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring
Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed |
As a CASA volunteer, you know that the system sometimes seems to perpetuate
abuse and neglect rather than truly save children. Reading Orphan Trains
will remind you that, however bad things may be now, they were worse in
the past. We may have a terrible shortage of foster parents, and many
of those who do take in our children may seem to be ill prepared to do
the job, but the fact is that they are all screened, trained and supervised.
It has not always been so.
MORE
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Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative Elizabeth Bartholet Boston, Beacon Press, 1999 |
Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in issues involving child welfare and adoption. Nobody’s Children is a well-written and well-informed book, as well as an extremely controversial one.
If you are looking for a very clear description of the history and politics
of child welfare, you will find it here. Bartholet brings the trends and
laws right up to 1999, through the swing of the pendulum towards Family
Preservation and away. In fact, this book breaks with the favored welfare
theories of the 1990s. Bartholet questions the wisdom of leaving children
with parents and kin and away from the interference of government welfare
agencies. She supports policies that limit the time and energy invested
in parents who do not demonstrate an ability to take care of their children.
MORE
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Emotional Intelligence |
If you have not yet read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman,
do so now, while you are a SFCASA Volunteer. This book is fascinating
for all its information about emotions and the brain, but it is even more
interesting for its revelations about people from distressed backgrounds
who have not learned emotional intelligence in childhood. Does your CASA
child seem really bright, but just doesn't do well in school? You might
be interested to read about "impaired frontal cortex functioning"
that can make emotionally stressed children impulsive, anxious, disruptive
and likely to get into trouble "not because their intellect is deficient,
but because their control over their emotional life is impaired. The emotional
brain, quite separate from those cortical areas tapped by IQ tests, controls
rage and compassion alike. These emotional circuits are sculpted by experience
throughout childhood—and we leave those experiences utterly to chance
at our peril." (pg. 27)
MORE
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WASTED: The Plight of America's Unwanted
Children |
Patrick T. Murphy is an attorney who has spent much of his career defending
abused and neglected children in the Juvenile Courts of Chicago. As he
says in his Foreward, "my story is a bleak one, and it does not have
a happy ending."
MORE
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The Broken Cord |
The Broken Cord was the first book to describe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
and Fetal Alcohol Effect for the general public when it was published
in 1989. The author, Michael Dorris, was a single man when he adopted
a little boy who turned out to have serious behavioral, emotional, and
developmental problems. Little by little, Dorris started to realize that
his son, called Adam in the book, was not as singular as he had thought.
Many children, particularly many Native American children, shared his
problems. Dorris discovered that many of these children even shared a
striking physical resemblance to Adam. They all suffered from the same
affliction, FAS, a syndrome produced by the toxic effects that alcohol
has on the developing brain and body of a child in the womb.
MORE
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Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and
How They Shape the Human Species |
The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition of Sara Blaffer Hardy's
700+ page (including extensive bibliography and footnotes) book accurately
calls this "a truly monumental work, as elegant as it is insightful."
If you are looking for a fascinating, intelligent, provocative, and well-researched
book, you need look no farther. Hardy writes about motherhood, childrearing,
instincts, family and cultural influences on development, biology, anthropology—and
life!
MORE
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A Child Called 'It': An Abused Child's
Journey from Victim to Victor |
A Child Called 'It' is a first-person narrative of a severely abused child who has survived to tell his tale. Dave Pelzer tells his story to help others heal from the trauma of the past.
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A Child's Journey Through Placement |
A Child’s Journey Through Placement is virtually a textbook
on the psychology of foster children for CASA volunteers. Written for
child welfare workers, this book clearly describes the importance of attachment
and the impact of separation and loss on children at each stage of their
lives. Its chapter on child development discusses the impact of each stage
on the parents and other caregivers as well as the child.
MORE
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Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and
the Conscience of a Nation |
If you only read one book about the lives of children growing up in poverty
in urban America, let it be Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace. This
is an unpretentious book. The author writes in a clear and graceful style
about his visits to the South Bronx and to Harlem. He describes the trip
to the South Bronx:"When you enter the train (in Manhattan), you
are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When
you leave, you are in the poorest." (pg. 3)
MORE
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Angela's Ashes |
Angela's Ashes is simply and purely one of the most moving and beautiful books about abused and neglected children that you can read. Frank McCourt describes his childhood in America and Ireland with an extraordinary mixture of compassion and dispassion. He will show you how to stay emotionally open and completely honest at the same time, and how to describe conditions of neglect and abuse without dehumanizing the perpetrators or the victims.
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Lost Boys: Why our Sons Turn Violent and
How We Can Save Them |
Do you want to learn more about boys who commit violent acts? James Garbarino
is a psychologist who has spent years getting to know such boys.
MORE
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