Understanding and Addressing Girls’ Aggressive Behaviour Problems

A Focus on Relationships

Debra Pepler, editor, and H. Bruce Ferguson, editor

SickKids Community and Mental Health

Book Description

Understanding and Addressing Girls’ Aggressive Behaviour Problems reflects a major shift in understanding aggressive behaviour problems among children. Researchers used to study what went wrong with a troubled child and needed to be fixed; we now aim to understand what is going wrong in children’s relationships that might create, exacerbate, and maintain aggressive behaviour problems in childhood and adolescence. In this volume, leading researchers in the aggression field examine, with a particular focus on girls, how problems develop for children in relationships and how we can help them develop healthy relationships.

Individual chapters explore biological and social contexts, including physical health and relationship problems that might underlie the development of aggressive behaviour problems. The impact of relationships on girls’ development is shown to be particularly important for Aboriginal girls. Contributors discuss prevention and intervention strategies that help aggressive children build the requisite skills and relationship capacities and also shift dynamics within critical social contexts, such as the family, peer group, classroom, and school.

The support of healthy development not only of children but of their parents and other important adults in their lives, including teachers, has been shown to be effective in reducing the burden of suffering associated with aggression among children and adolescents—for youth themselves as well as their families, peers, schools, communities, and society.

About Debra Pepler, and H. Bruce Ferguson

Debra J. Pepler is a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University and a senior adjunct scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Her research is on aggression and victimization among children and adolescents. With Wendy Craig, she leads a national network, PREVNet (Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network), to promote safe and healthy relationships for all Canadian children and youth (www.prevnet.ca).

H. Bruce Ferguson was the founding director of the Community Health Systems Resource Group at the Hospital for Sick Children and is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Related interest

Psychology/mental health

By the same editor

Hearing Voices: Qualitative Inquiry in Early Psychosis, Katherine M. Boydell, editor, and H. Bruce Ferguson, editor

Preventing Eating-Related and Weight-Related Disorders: Collaborative Research, Advocacy, and Policy Change, Gail L. McVey, editor, Michael P. Levine, editor,, Niva Piran, editor, and H. Bruce Ferguson, editor

Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions, Kate Tilleczek, editor, and H. Bruce Ferguson, editor

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