Supporting Difficult Transitions: Children, Young People and their Carers(Transitions in Childhood and Youth)

The international contributors to Supporting Difficult Transitions discuss examples of transitions that are problematic for children, young people and their carers. Focusing on vulnerable children and young people, the transitions include: starting school, changing schools, starting work, entering a new culture or a culture that has been changed to focusing on vulnerable children and young people. The book will be useful to practitioners involved in supporting children and their carers as they make these moves; students and course tutors in the caring professions; researchers; and policy makers and those who implement policy for children and young people. The different case examples are given coherence by drawing on cultural-historical approaches to how people move between practices. Particular attention is paid to how practitioners can build shared understandings of what matters for children and young people and for the institutions they are entering. These understandings become a resource to strengthen collaborations between practitioners or between practitioners and the children and their carers, as they support entry into new practices.

Table of Contents:
1. Rethinking Professional Support for Challenging Transitions: Enabling the Agency of Children, Young People and Their Families, Anne Edwards and Mariane Hedegaard Part I: A Fresh Look at Professional Work with Children, Young People and Families 2. Child Based Practice Development for Children in Areas of Concern: A Model for Enabling Both the Child’s and Teachers’ Perspectives, Mariane Hedegaard 3. Common Knowledge between Mothers and Children in Problematic Transitions: How Professionals Make Children’s Motives Available as a Resource, Nick Hopwood and Teena Clerke 4. Changing Practices in the Highlands of Vietnam: Transitioning from Subjects of Research to Agents of Change, Marilyn Fleer, Helen Hedges, Freya Fleer-Stout and Hanh Le Thi Bich 5. Radical-Local Screening of Preschool Children’s Social Situations of Development: From Abilities to Activities, Mariane Hedegaard & Naussunguaq Lyberth Part II: Enabling Families as Supporters of Children’s and Young People’s Transitions 6. Easing Transitions into School from Social Excluded ‘Hard To Reach’ Families: From Risk and Resilience to Agency and Demand, Anne Edwards and Maria Evangelou 7 Relational Approaches to Supporting Transitions into School: Families and Early Childhood Educators Working Together in Regional Chile, Christine Woodrow and Kerry Staples 8. The Transition to of Roma Children into School: Working Relationally across Cultural Boundaries in Spain, José Luis Lalueza, Virginia Martínez-Lozano and Beatriz Macías-Gómez-Estern 9. Small Children’s Movements across Residential Care and Day-Care: How Professionals Build Common Knowledge and Practice That Matters for Children, Ida Schwartz 10. Helping Children in Cross-Cultural Post-Disaster Settings: Creating Relational Pathways to Resilience,Pernille Hansen Part III: Supporting the Agency of Children and Young People in Transitions 11. When Young Adulthood Presents a Double Challenge: Mental Illness, Disconnected Activities, and Relational Agency, Sofie Pedersen 12. Children with Disabilities Growing Up and Becoming Adults: Socio-cultural Challenges around the Transition to Adulthood, Louise Bøttcher 13. Supporting the Transitions into Work of Autistic Young People: Building and Using Common Knowledge, Anne Edwards and Yvette Fay Index

About the Author :
Mariane Hedegaard is Professor Emerita of Developmental Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Anne Edwards is Professor Emerita in the Department of Education at Oxford University, UK, where she was Director of the department and co-founder of the Oxford University Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT).

Review :
Attending to the topic of transitions through this relational approach offers a powerful lens that makes visible taken for granted experiences and enables ways to rethink the processes, practices, and structures we have built. This book reminds us all that we can change what we have built and that, with change, we are likely to see improvements in the experience of transitions. Essential reading for professionals working with children in times of transitions. Traditional psychological approaches to transitions have largely tended to focus interventions at changing individuals, without developing an understanding of a child’s social situation of development. This book, written by experts in the field, addresses this gap in the literature by situating transitions socio-culturally and historically.