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The important role of family, when treating Juvenile offenders

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Would you please explain the role and importance of family in the treatment of juvenile offenders.

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The important role of family, when treating Juvenile offenders is explained.

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Hi, and thanks so much for your confidence in me and using Brain Mass! First, I can tell you that this is an excellent request! First, I am going to explain the importance of the family, type of evidenced based treatment protocol, and provide you references. I have direct practice experience with Multisystemic Therapy. Hope this helps! Take care!

Education, mental health and social services systems increasingly promote parental involvement in their children's system experiences, presuming that parents are key to the system's goals for that child. The juvenile justice system has also turned its attention to the multiple ways in which parents
can and should be involved in the justice process. What we need to take into account here, given we are talking about the legal system, historically, the system has emphasized the importance of parental involvement in treatment and rehabilitation efforts. Yet, parents have been treated ambivalently by the system. Now, with that said, sometimes as the cause of juvenile crime and sometimes as the cure (Platt, 1977). In fact, the legislative
approach to parental involvement has focused almost entirely on parental responsibility through the use of sanctions, which is only one approach to parental involvement. Thus, the way the system approaches dealing with parents often depends on the resources and philosophy of
each individual court. That can be challenging. It seems more likely that we would see courts reaching out to families in jurisdictions with greater resources and a larger menu of programs targeted towards the rehabilitation of youth and involving families as well as the manpower to
educate and seek participation from parents. Similarly, those that have a more rehabilitative rather than punitive focus may place more emphasis on involving parents. The potential for variation within as well as across states is huge.

Research does evidence, (I can attest to this in practice) parents and the family are a critical component of any response to delinquency, but in practice the state and parents may be unsure how to engage each other constructively in this process. Parents may be ambivalent about court involvement for a variety of reasons. It is important to add that parents who see the system as intrusive and unnecessary will likely interact with the court in a more
adversarial way than parents who see it as an avenue to needed services. Even for parents predisposed to involvement in the court process, a variety of factors can impede positive engagement by parents. That is a factor to consider.

Research on parental involvement in education has uncovered some intriguing and helpful findings. First, parental involvement is positively related to achievement; the more involved a parent is, the greater the child's educational achievement (Cotton & Wikelund, 1989). Yet, it also shows parental involvement is complex and not solely defined by participation in events on school grounds (Finn, 1998). It appears that living
in a home in which parents monitor and organize time and talk about school-related issues is ...

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