A Hard Place to Call Home: A Canadian Perspective on Residential Care and Treatment for Children and Youth

In this seminal resource, Dr. Kiaras Gharabaghi identifies an underlying absence of unifying theory and practice in Canada’s child and youth residential care and treatment services. By drawing on organizational examples from across Canada, Gharabaghi exposes how the historical dynamics of mediocrity and complacency have led to inadequate standards and practices within the system. More assuredly, this resource exposes readers to alternative ways of re-imagining a system that is designed from a space of care, healing, and growth that promotes autonomy for all young people.

This well-timed resource offers the child and youth services community a positive, constructive, and revolutionary framework for residential care and treatment that is fundamentally based on a partnership between caregivers and young people, their families, neighbourhoods, and communities. Dr. Gharabaghi’s sophisticated and provocative analysis of the system’s key issues is an essential resource for students, practitioners, and educators in the field of child and youth care and in the human services more broadly.