Families have the potential for causing harm and can play a part in the onset of mental health problems. Women’s behaviour is judged by a different set of standards to that of men. Parents still socialise girls differently from boys. The pressures of family life chip away at our confidence and self-esteem and powerfully influencing our ability to make successful adult relationships. Girls and women may be told that they are ‘hysterical’ or ‘out of their mind’ when their emotional response is quite justified by what is happening to them. However, life pressures can also trigger mental illness, and family stress such as living in poverty and with domestic violence can make this worse. Girls and young women experience much more sexual abuse during childhood than boys – the sheer extent of which was not acknowledged in the past. Improving material and psychological support to families is a mammoth task, but what is within our power, among our own friends, families and communities, is to do something when we suspect that young women are experiencing trauma and abuse – believing, helping and supporting them to find someone to share their stories with who is trustworthy and skilled.

This chapter begins with the families of Hannibal and Scipio. Hannibal’s mother is unknown; the name of Scipio’s abnormally pious mother, Pomponia, is preserved only in a Latin epic poem by Silius Italicus (first century CE). The older male relatives of both Hannibal and Scipio were distinguished soldiers. Hannibal married an Iberian woman; Scipio, a member of the Cornelian gens (group of families), married the daughter of another Roman aristocrat, from the Aemilian gens. Carthaginian and Roman naming habits are explained. Hannibal’s surname Barca is a family name, not an ‘ethnic’ – indicator of local origin – from the Greek city Barce. (A contrary argument is rejected in Appendix 2.1.) The childhood and youth of Hannibal and Scipio are discussed, including Hannibal’s famous oath in Iberia never to be friendly to the Romans, the events of the 230s and 220s are narrated, and pre−220 Roman and Carthaginian history and society are analysed.

As the largest publicly funded, nonformal education system in the United States, Cooperative Extension (a.k.a. “Extension”) has played a critical role in how technologies and innovations generated through state agricultural experiment stations (AES) and land-grant universities (LGUs) in the United States have been translated and shared directly to its constituents for over a century. Extension has served as a unique and robust system to collaborate, generate, and disseminate research, as well as to engage in mission-oriented work to support communities in optimizing their current and future circumstances and through collaborative partnerships shaping the ways in which we cultivate and preserve food, how we educate and care for our children, manage our finances, work with communities, and support populations disproportionality affected by structural inequities. The current volume brings together leading scholars to discuss Extension’s contributions to the well-being of children, youth, families, and communities; and to critically reflect on Extension’s future directions in light of significant shifts in the context in which it now operates.

Extension is uniquely positioned to reach and support underserved and underrepresented families. Although Extension excels at providing evidence-based programming for mothers, children, and youth, it has generally been less successful in engaging fathers. Recent evidence finds increased balanced sharing of caregiving responsibilities and fathers’ desire to engage with their children. Engaging fathers and incorporating father-centric programming is more important than ever. This chapter will highlight promising strategies for engaging fathers in Extension, including an example of a statewide needs assessment, technology-based programming, and community-based partnerships. We describe available evidence-based programs and approaches, both currently utilized with fathers and aptly positioned to accommodate fathers, along with promising opportunities and important considerations for Extension moving forward. Shifting the focus to better serve fathers in family-based programming will better engage and support underserved and vulnerable families, and Extension is a system that is critically important for meeting this challenge.

This chapter focuses on how to explore opportunities to partner with families in articulating support systems for child health and wellbeing. In particular, it explores how student educators and educators can reach out to families and develop the necessary partnerships to successfully support parents in their parenting and caring roles, with the aim of positively influencing children’s family lives, health and wellbeing.

Responders in the UK attend a range of emergencies, incidents, disasters, and disease outbreaks (EIDD). Although the impacts on professional responders have been researched, documented, and are reasonably well understood, the consequences of that exposure to such incidents for their families is relatively underexplored. This chapter identifies the links between the wellbeing of families of responders and the impacts from the occupation of their emergency service family members. The support given by family members is explored in the context of social support, diffusing, and managing mental health. This is informed by empirically evidenced research projects detailing the occupational consequences for the families of responders through literature and national project work.

This chapter starts by considering the key differences that make public health practice focused on children unique to that focused on adults and older people and emphasizes the importance of early intervention as part of a life-course approach. The demography of the health of children is detailed, followed by a description of the major causes of ill health in children and young people, key public health challenges for this age group and their families and a summary of effective public health interventions to improve health and well-being and reduce inequalities. Three case studies are offered: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; childhood obesity; and children’s and adolescents’ mental health. These highlight the complexity of these major public health challenges, how the tools described in Part 1 can be used to understand them and the importance of strategic and system-wide approaches.

This chapter focuses on the hundreds of so-called criminal lunatics who appeared to slip between the gaps in psychiatric provision over the 1940s and ended up in the lunatic sections of the mandate’s prisons. Their abandonment, this chapter argues, was the product of often- fraught negotiations across state and society: mandate officials in particular worried that the families of the mentally ill were staging minor criminal offences in order to have their relatives bypass long waiting lists and access institutional provision. Through a careful reading of case files from the rich archive of the criminal lunatic section at Acre, this chapter delves into the complex dynamics that surrounded these individuals’ routes into – as well as out of – this institutional site. These stories reveal that neither insanity nor criminality was a stable category in mandate Palestine. But the case files, particularly the ‘delusions’ they record, also hold out the possibility of recovering the experiences and perspectives of those deemed criminally insane, and indeed their capacity to exercise a degree of agency over their lives.

This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

In this chapter, the authors shift attention to younger BFRB clients and to modifications to ComB treatment when children, family members, and other caretakers are involved in therapy. Managing these additional people presents added complexity for the therapist to manage. Ideas for helping create a supportive, therapeutic social context for younger clients are presented throughout. Commonly occurring misconceptions, anxieties and problematic relationship issues are described, explored, and addressed throughout, with an emphasis placed on coaching caregivers into positive and supportive roles in the therapeutic endeavor. Also addressed is the importance of setting realistic expectations for therapy and coaching caregivers to deal with the inevitable motivational issues that will have to be addressed for effective treatment of younger clients. Different recommendations, reflecting the varying needs of clients of different ages – infants, younger and older children, and adolescents, are provided – as are approaches for dealing with children with sensory dysregulation issues.

In this chapter, we discuss adolescence as a period of imaginative future-making, where identities are in flux and worked on, and self-consciousness enhanced. We draw on Vygotsky to argue that the conceptual thinking that marks adolescence enables them to closely analyze current realities, see connections they had not previously recognized, and grapple with complexities. These capabilities also allow adolescents to look beyond their immediate surroundings and become actively responsible citizens. Conceptual thinking therefore needs nurturing in environments that present meaningful challenges, offer the resources that can help young people tackle them and recognize the role of emotion in conceptual development. We explain how a relational approach can help young people with the development of identities that can engage them with what society offers. We also show how a relational pedagogy, including the use of digital resources, can sustain students as they tackle the curricular demands of high school, including subject matter knowledge. We point to the potential importance of families in supporting young people in the transition to adulthood and conclude by discussing efforts framed by cultural-historical understandings at supporting this transition for vulnerable young people.

The cultural-historical concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency are introduced as central to the work of practitioners who offer a caring (care-full) relational approach to supporting the learning and development of others. Drawing on examples from the field, we examine how the concepts can explain interprofessional collaborations and the prevention of social exclusion, which may frequently include involving parents or carers in focusing on a difficult situation for a child. We consequently discuss and illustrate the concepts in professionals’ work with parents or carers, which aims at mutual support for a child’s social situation of development during transitions. We demonstrate how three concepts can explain how practitioners negotiate their way up a system to find additional support for a child who is in a situation of concern. Our final example is their use in an instrument that assesses the collaborative maturity of teams or networks. The use of the three relational concepts in pedagogy is detailed in Chapter 7.