Transcultural Child Development: Psychological Assessment and Treatment

Is the Asian child you're assessing suffering from introversion and lack of self-confidence, or is her quiet demeanor simply a reflection of strongly held cultural values—piety, modesty, and respect for authority? Is your young Puerto Rican patient ADD, or are his aggressiveness and lack of attention a response to the chaotic, unsupervised, dangerous atmosphere at his school? How are mental and emotional disorders expressed among children from different cultural backgrounds, and how can they best be treated? In Transcultural Child Development, the nation's leading practitioners of transcultural child psychology address these and many other questions that surround this broad and under-researched field.

The book begins with an examination of the social, cultural, and historical context of child psychiatry in America and a discussion of the changing complexion of America's children due to new patterns of immigration. This is followed by an overview of the impact of culture on both the incidence of psychopathology and the ways in which disorders are expressed, as well as an examination of children in special circumstances, such as refugees, illegal immigrants, and victims of severe emotional or physical trauma. Clinicians experienced in treating children of specific cultural backgrounds discuss each culture and its relationship to mainstream American culture in 14 chapters that comprise the meat of the book. The focus of these discussions is on how these cultural relationships may contribute to, alleviate, mask, or create a false impression of psychological disorders in children.

Transcultural Child Development helps mental health professionals understand the biological, psychological, social, and cultural factors that influence the development of children from other cultures. It is must reading for child psychologists and psychiatrists, school psychologists, and other professionals involved with the evaluation and treatment of culturally diverse children. It is also a helpful guide for teachers, school counselors, clergy members, and others who need to understand and support youngsters trying to establish a foothold in a new and difficult world.

Transcultural Child Development presents information on children of different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups from every major region of the world, including African Americans native to the United States. The contributors are leading practitioners of transcultural therapy, and many are writing about children from their own cultural backgrounds. Their aim is to help clinicians understand, assess, and treat mental and emotional disorders that may be expressed quite differently by children of different cultures. Each chapter provides the most extensive information available on children from more than a dozen different ethnic, racial, and national origins:

• Puerto Rican Children
• Central American Children
• Children from the Middle East
• Asian Indian Children
• Filipino American Children
• Native Hawaiian Children
• Hmong Children
• Korean American Children
• Chinese American Children
• African American Children
• West African Children
• Children of Mexican Descent
• Children of Micronesia
• Children from the Former Soviet Union