Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jewelle Taylor Gibbs is professor emerita at the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Race and Justice and Young, Black, and Male in America both from Jossey-Bass.

Larke Nahme Huang is a clinical community psychologist affiliated with Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

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Children of Color is the thoroughly revised and expanded edition of the classic and definitive guide to the unique problems and special needs of minority youth experiencing psychological and behavioral problems. This comprehensive book presents crucial information on culturally sensitive and culturally competent assessment and treatment approaches for young African Americans, Asian Americans, Central Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, biracial-bicultural, and other so-called minority youth. This new edition contains a wealth of new statistical data, demographics, and cutting- edge interventions techniques, contributed by an ethnically diverse group of mental health professionals who are experts in their fields.

Aus dem Klappentext

Children of Color is the thoroughly revised and expanded edition of the classic and definitive guide to the unique problems and special needs of minority youth experiencing psychological and behavioral problems. This comprehensive book presents crucial information on culturally sensitive and culturally competent assessment and treatment approaches for young African Americans, Asian Americans, Central Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, biracial-bicultural, and other so-called minority youth. This new edition contains a wealth of new statistical data, demographics, and cutting- edge interventions techniques, contributed by an ethnically diverse group of mental health professionals who are experts in their fields.

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Children of Color

Psychological Interventions with Culturally Diverse Youth

Jossey-Bass

Copyright © 2003 Jewelle Taylor Gibbs
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7879-6268-5

Preface

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, children and adolescents of color constitute the most rapidly expanding segment of the youth population in America, yet there is a serious dearth of literature available to enlighten clinicians, educators, health professionals, social workers, and policymakers about these children's problems and needs. When the first edition of this book was published in 1989, we recognized the need for a comprehensive text on the psychological assessment and treatment of ethnic minority children and adolescents-a group that had been generally neglected in the proliferation of textbooks on minority mental health in the 1980s. In general, these books focused on the mental health problems of minority adults and the implications of ethnicity for family therapy. However, all of the major ethnic minority groups are characterized by disproportionately youthful populations, as compared to the dominant white majority. Our experiences as clinicians, researchers, teachers, policy analysts, and consultants further emphasized the need for a book that would encompass theoretical, empirical, and clinical perspectives concerning the assessment and interventions for youth of color.

The response of mental health professionals, educators, and students to the first edition of the book was so positive that we revised it for an updated paperback edition in 1998. To date, there are still only a few books that address the unique problems and special needs of ethnic minority children and adolescents with psychological and behavioral problems. Although in recent years there has been an increase in the knowledge base about ethnic minority populations, this knowledge has been effectively translated into only a few comprehensive handbooks for use in the clinical intervention and training of mental health and human service professionals. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of nonwhite and Hispanic-speaking youth aged ten to nineteen in the United States increased from 31 to 36 percent of all U.S. youth, underscoring the need for educational and clinical resources relevant to this group (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). In fact, ethnic minority youth now make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. public school population and over 60 percent of the student population in many large urban school districts, with concomitant increases in academic and behavioral problems that teachers and counselors are unprepared to handle effectively (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2001). Thus this second edition of our book is designed to meet the needs of educators and professionals in the mental health and human service professions, including psychiatry, psychology, social work, psychiatric nursing, and counseling, who are faced with the challenges of working with this burgeoning population of racially and culturally diverse youth.

This book is designed to fulfill several goals and to be useful in a wide variety of clinical, professional, and educational settings. First, its primary purpose is to present a well-balanced discussion of the issues involved in the clinical assessment and treatment of minority children and adolescents from four major ethnic groups and one emerging biracial-bicultural population group. A broad range of interventions is covered by the various contributors, from psychodynamic to social cognitive to systems-oriented approaches, with an ecological perspective providing a common thread across groups and serving to integrate the conventional with the more culture-based methods of intervention.

Second, a comparative, cross-cultural approach to the book will provide an overarching framework around which each chapter will be organized, enabling the reader to compare selected topics (for example, socialization practices, identity formation, coping strategies, assessment issues, treatment approaches) across ethnic groups.

Third, the book reflects a major commitment to an ecological perspective that recognizes the significant impact of social and environmental factors such as poverty, discrimination, immigration, and family structure on the adaptation and coping patterns of ethnic minority children and adolescents. We strongly believe that some knowledge of a group's history in the United States, traditional value system, family organization, and current demographic reality is essential for the accurate clinical assessment and effective intervention with youth from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Thus relevant background information is briefly summarized for each ethnic minority group in order to provide a sociocultural context that justifies the recommendations for differential strategies of assessment and treatment.

The most difficult aspect of planning the scope of this book was the initial decision concerning which groups to include and which groups to exclude. Our decision was to focus on children and adolescents from the four largest ethnic minority groups in the United States: African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, and Hispanic-Latino Americans. To acknowledge the diversity within each of these groups, we selected three of the largest subgroups among Asian Americans and Hispanic-Latino Americans: Chinese, Filipino, and Southeast Asians (representing the Asian American population) and Central American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican Americans (representing the Hispanic-Latino population). In addition, we have included a chapter on the rapidly increasing population of biracial and bicultural youth, who represent an emerging multiracial and multicultural population group.

These particular ethnic groups were selected for several reasons. First, they have been historically the largest minority groups with the longest period of residence in this country. Second, more literature and a greater range of reliable sources were available for writing about these groups. And third, these groups represent a range of demographic, linguistic, and acculturation differences. For example, in terms of population trends, Southeast Asians are rapidly increasing because they have high birth rates, whereas numbers of Japanese Americans, who were included in the earlier editions of our book, are stabilizing and perhaps even declining due to high rates of out-of-group marriage. The route of entry to the United States varies from American Indians and Alaskan Natives, who are indigenous peoples, to African Americans, who were imported as slaves, to the Japanese and Chinese Americans, who were imported as cheap laborers, to the most recent Southeast Asians and Central Americans, who were initially admitted as political refugees.

Along with these differences in migration history, a continuum of acculturation among these groups is reflected in linguistic and cultural patterns ranging from the bilingualism of many second-generation Spanish-speaking Americans to the rapid assimilation of many fourth-generation Filipino Americans. It is important to emphasize the wide diversity within each ethnic group; the attitudes, behaviors, and values of group members are strongly influenced by their degree of acculturation, their socioeconomic status (SES), and their ties with ethnic institutions and communities. For example, there may be greater differences between the first and third generations of Chinese Americans than between middle-class, acculturated Chinese and white Americans. Thus although our contributors have attempted to describe the traditional history, culture, and...