In Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, social workers, sociologists, researchers, and helping professionals share engaging and evocative stories of practice that aim to center the young client’s story. Drawing on work with a variety of disadvantaged populations in New York City and around the world, they seek to raise awareness of the diversity of the individual experiences of youth. They make use of a variety of narrative approaches to offer new perspectives on a range of critical health care, mental health, and social issues that shape the lives of children and adolescents.

The book considers the narratives we tell about the lives and experiences of children and adolescents and proposes counternarratives that challenge dominant ideas about childhood. Contributors examine the environments and structures that shape the lives of children and youth from an ecological lens. From their stories emerge questions about how those working with young clients might respond to a changing landscape: How do we define and construct childhood? How do poverty and inequality impact children’s health and welfare? How is childhood lived at the intersection of race, class, and gender? How can practitioners engage children and adolescents through culturally responsive and democratic processes? Offering new frameworks for reflecting on social work practice, the essays in Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents also serve as a vehicle for exploration of children’s agency and voice.

Exploring children’s lives through narrative lenses illuminates aspects of their lived experience that are often invisible or overlooked in conventional research studies. Such information enriches our understanding of children’s lives, enabling a more holistic context from which new and relevant practices can be developed. As such, the book is an important addition to social work curricula and a useful resource for practitioners. -- Stanley Witkin, author of Transforming Social Work: Social Constructionist Reflections on Contemporary and Enduring Issues
With respect and without condescension, Diaz and Shepard remind us how resilient children are —their stories defying deficit-based clinical categorization. We have much to learn from these narratives of coping and adaptation. Combining case studies and auto-ethnography with a narrative focus, this is social work research at its most acute and innovative. -- Irwin Epstein, Hunter College, City University of New York
Through brave story-telling, this volume reveals the lived experiences, creativity, and agency of children and youth. Whether concerned with the child welfare system, schools, incarceration, or mental health, the authors bring a critical lens to the role that systems play in oppression and liberation. Using reflexivity, auto-ethnography, and case reflections, the authors also reveal their whole selves as they negotiate their realities as social workers and reflect on their own experiences as vulnerable children. -- Loretta Pyles, University at Albany
A groundbreaking text that deftly and subtly explores the lived experience of children and youth, providing us with a profound exploration of their strengths and challenges. This creative, evocative, and deeply engaging book is a must read for all human service workers seeking to empower children and adolescents. -- Rich Furman, University of Washington Tacoma

Mery F. Diaz is assistant professor of health and human services at the New York City College of Technology.

Benjamin Shepard is professor of health and human services at the New York City College of Technology and the author or editor of ten other books, including Illuminations on Market Street.