Norma Kolko Phillips

The Impact of Job Loss on Professional and Managerial Employees and Their Families

Despite the recent economic boom, layoffs of professional and managerial employees in the United States continue to affect millions of individuals and their family members. This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study of the impact of unemployment on ten displaced professionals and managers and their families. A seven-stage typology describing reactions of the unemployed and their families to long-term unemployment is presented. Impact on the family, differences in reactions to loss of employment based on gender and on age, and information regarding re-employment status of these individuals are discussed. Implications for work-based programs, clinical services, and policy are provided.

The role of empathy in work with women offenders

Research has validated the crucial aspect of empathy in effective clinical practice. Empathy requires the identification of the helping professional with the emotional experience of the client. However, in their work with women offenders, clinicians can encounter a number of obstacles to appropriate empathic interventions: the workers may over‐empathize with their clients; the offenders may be resistant to being helped; and there may be institutional and social dynamics that may discourage empathic helping by staff. This paper discusses the concept of empathy and the difficulties encountered by social workers and other clinicians in their efforts to provide appropriate empathic approaches to this population. Effective strategies that will allow for appropriate use of empathy by clinicians working with female offenders are offered.

Mother-Child Interaction Group: Model for Joint Treatment

The health-oriented group described here provides joint treatment of mothers and high-risk infants and toddlers by meeting with them in an environment that provides opportunities for firsthand observations of interactions and on-the-spot supportive interventions.

Indigenous Children’s Rights: A Sociological Perspective on Boarding Schools and Transracial Adoption

A sociological analysis of policies related to boarding schools and transracial adoption of indigenous children in Canada, the U.S.A., Australia and New Zealand, between the 1860s and the 1980s, demonstrates the similarity of the outcome of these programmes. While undertaken in the name of protection and/or acculturation, these policies and programmes resulted in trauma to the children, their families, and their cultures, as well as in abuses that were in violation of children’s rights as defined by international organizations, in particular the United Nations. Examination of the profound consequences of boarding schools and transracial adoption during this historical period can serve as a guide to humane, effective, and culturally sensitive child welfare policies.

Cultural Difference and Adoption Policy in the United States: The Quest for Social Justice for Children

This article discusses the impact of cultural difference on adoption in the United States (U.S.) during three historical periods and along three dimensions: religion, race and ethnicity. The focus is on the extent to which national and international definitions of the rights of the child as put forth by the United States, the United Nations and The Hague have affected adoption policy and practice. The article questions the extent to which the failure to respond to cultural differences has diminished the rights of the child and resulted in social injustice. Although focused on the U.S., the argument has relevance for many other countries, including Sweden, Romania, Ukraine, Australia, Korea and China.

Intervention with high-risk infants and toddlers.

This early intervention program serves children and parents. It includes a therapeutic infant day care center and a mother-child interaction group. Counseling is also provided for families with children in the center and for families with children under three years of age in the community.

Forced Migration and Immigration Programs for Children: The Emergence of a Social Movement

As a result of industrialisation, urbanisation, and mass migrations, the problem of homeless and abandoned children emerged in urban centres. Identified by some as dangerous and threatening to the existing social order, solutions to rescue or control the children were sought, including placing-out through forced migration and immigration programs, with no plan or intention of family reunification. This article examines two experimental programs that took the form of forced migration/immigration between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s – the “Orphan Trains” in the United States and the British “Child Migrant Programme”. The dire consequences of these programs gained public attention and had a profound impact on the development of the global emerging child welfare movement and concerns for the rights of children.