Edith M. Freeman

Narrative and Culturally Based Approaches in Practice With Families

This article clarifies how narrative approaches are consistent with social works view of clients as experts on their own narratives and experiences. These approaches are also consistent with family therapy as it has evolved toward family centered practice and an emphasis on the importance of family narratives and meaning. Guidelines are provided for using narrative approaches with culturally diverse clients in a range of practice settings in combination with task-centered, solution-focused, family systems, and crisis intervention models. Practice vignettes and examples of clients’ narratives help to illustrate how practitioners can integrate those models effectively with some of the most salient narrative strategies. Such strategies include listening to and acknowledging clients’ narratives, helping them to define their challenges through their narratives, engaging in a collaborative search for meaning, increasing clients’ awareness of relationships of power and domination, facilitating clients in recounting stories of competence and strength, and affirming clients’ privilege to author their lives and co-construct alternative narratives. The discussion on narrative strategies demonstrates how to help clients move from meaning-making to individual, interpersonal, and large systems changes.

Interaction of Pregnancy, Loss, and Developmental Issues in Adolescents

Pregnant adolescents may experience losses in unique ways or may experience additional losses as a result of their pregnancy. This article explores some of the common losses that may be experienced during adolescence and relates them to losses that may be experienced by adolescent mothers.

Clinical Practice with Employed Women

The increased entrance of women into the labor force has resulted in increased stress for women who must deal with multiple role responsibilities. An assessment and intervention approach is proposed for identifying and resolving work-related problems in women who experience dysfunctional stress.

High-Risk Children and Adolescents: Family and Community Environments

Developmental factors, family problems such as substance abuse, and other environmental variables, including violence, greatly affect the adjustment and coping of children and youth. Such variables can result in inaccurate assessments and diagnoses when young people are viewed in isolation from their situations and environments and when adult-oriented diagnostic tools are utilized. The authors describe the use of clinical interviews to provide more accurate diagnoses and strengths-oriented assessments for children and youth who receive case-management services from mental health centers. Implications for prevention and treatment are discussed.

Empowering Single Mothers

This article describes a management-planning procedure, based on a feminist perspective, for highlighting the short- and long-term consequences of parenthood for teenage mothers. It presents examples of how educational and employment programs have used this procedure to become more client centered and to identify ways to empower their clients.

Multiple Losses in the Elderly: An Ecological Approach

The elderly person is likely to have to deal with a multiplicity of losses in several significant areas. Proper intervention from the environment can help elderly clients cope with necessary losses, prevent those that are avoidable, and achieve mutual support systems to combat “generational disconnectedness.”

Adolescents' Experience with Death: Practice Implications

Like others in society, adolescents tend to deny death rather than accepting its inevitability as part of the life cycle. Social work practitioners can help this vulnerable group by providing education about death and dying, and helping adolescents address and relabel their reactions to the dying process.