"An eye-opening and heart-opening book."

-Bonnie Benard, Senior Program Associate, WestEd

Identify and promote overlooked strengths to cultivate resilience.

Now more than ever, counselors, teachers, community youth workers, and parents are striving to prevent individual and school-wide tragedy before it happens. Critical to the success of their efforts is a deep respect for the adolescent experience. In this book, author and social worker Michael Ungar takes a fresh, hopeful approach to challenging youth by looking beyond the surface of "bad" behaviors to understand them as ways of coping with life′s adversities.

Strengths-Based Counseling With At-Risk Youth provides the tools both to understand and access strengths buried beneath problem behaviors. It offers specific, effective strategies in working with adolescents to construct positive identities and realistic action plans. Features include

• Six strategies for youth engagement, covering common problem behaviors such as drug use, violence, delinquency, and promiscuity


• An entire chapter on bullying


• An abundance of real-life examples and counseling narratives


• A Resilient Youth Strengths Inventory to assess resilience and identify areas that need strengthening

Sincere application of Ungar′s compassionate and open-minded strategies is sure to transform the lives of countless adolescents in need, and the institutions that serve them.