Most teenage fathers care about what happens to their children and need to be given the opportunity to explore their concerns and feelings; however, they do not usually ask for help on their own. The Maximizing a Life Experience (MALE) program focuses on the goals of helping young men to understand their emotional as well as their legal rights and…

This digest is intended to help parents and teachers understand and cope with underachievement in gifted students. Underachievement is defined and its various components (e.g., content and situation specificity and ties to self-concept development) are explained. Strategies to reverse patterns of underachievement are classified as either…

This digest discusses factors associated with the acceptance and rejection of preschool children by their peers and offers a number of strategies that teachers and other adults can use in their attempts to help children achieve social acceptance. Behaviors and characteristics associated with peer rejection include aggression and misinterpretation…

Many teens experience a time when keeping up with school work is difficult. Some adolescents are able to get through this time with minimal assistance from their parents or teachers. However, when the difficulties last longer than a single grading period or are linked to a long-term pattern of poor school performance, parents and teachers may need…

This fact sheet presents teenage suicide as a reaction to stress in adolescence compounded by increasing stress in the environment. It can also be examined as part of a three-step process: a previous history of problems, problems associated with adolescence, and a precipitating event. Contrary to popular belief, suicide is not an impulsive act but…

This fact sheet discusses the role of the school counselor in interventions for school phobia, transient and latchkey children, and children from single parent families. (MCF)

This digest presents a description of three innovative interventions designed to support student literacy acquisition outside the classroom in low resource communities. It begins with a discussion of literacy related issues in low resource environments, noting that an increasing number of children who are not acquiring a basic education live in…

Can the contemporary family's problems be solved in ways that seemed effective in the past? The extent to which the family has changed argues in the negative. The American family has been stripped of two of its traditional social functions: serving as a unit for economic production and as a school for the vocational training of children. The first…

Bullying is a serious problem that can dramatically affect the ability of students to progress academically and socially. Bullying is comprised of direct behaviors such as teasing, taunting, threatening, hitting, and stealing that are initiated by one or more students against a victim. Bullying may also be more indirect by causing a student to be…

The school reform movement has been a major societal and political agenda item for nearly two decades. As a result of the pressure stemming from the movement to make schools more effective, many changes have occurred. The most obvious of these changes is an increased emphasis on assessment. Furthermore, school counselors, like teachers and…