Are you passionate about prevention, curious about child and youth development, and interested in developing new ways to promote positive outcomes for young people? A master’s degree in social work with a concentration in Children & Youth: Risks and Healthy Development will prepare you to work with adolescents and children in a wide variety of settings, including mental health, family services and community agencies, schools, treatment centers and correctional facilities.
Using a resilience framework, you’ll learn to apply theories and practices for prevention, early intervention and clinical treatment with children and youth — supporting children, youth and their families by increasing protective factors such as social connections and decreasing risk factors such as academic problems.
Want to learn more about the concentration in Children & Youth: Risks and Healthy Development?
Your Career Options
Employment of child, family and school social workers is projected to grow 14 percent by 2026 — faster than the average for all occupations. More school social workers will be needed as student enrollments increase. With an MSW concentration in Children & Youth: Risks and Healthy Development, your social work career could entail:
- Conducting individual and group therapy with children and adolescents in schools, mental health centers or residential treatment facilities
- Empowering young people to advocate for pressing community issues
- Developing and implementing restorative justice programs
- Developing and implementing interventions to prevent bullying, school dropout, delinquency and substance use
- Advocating for policy reform across systems, including juvenile justice, education and mental health
- Promoting positive youth development by building youths’ skills and competencies through after-school programs
Featured Courses
SOWK 4726
Experiential Therapy
About this Course
This course provides students with knowledge and skills to facilitate experiential-based therapy with children, youth, families and couples with a focus on environmentally sound practices. This is considered a service learning class since we are partnering with nature. Please wear comfortable clothes and comfortable closed toed shoes for all classes and bring a water bottle.
SOWK 4412
Practice Elements in Interventions with Children and Youth
About this Course
This course offers an integrative framework of theory and research to intervene with children and adolescents in school, family, and community-based agencies. Interventions include both direct work with children and collaborative/conjoint work with parents. Techniques include common elements across empirically-supported interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavioral treatment, client centered treatment, social skills training, and parent management training. Intervention strategies are described across four primary problem areas common among children/adolescents: anxiety, depression, disruptive behavior, and attention deficit disorder. For each of these problem areas, intervention techniques are demonstrated, practiced in class, implemented in field placements, and monitored for client progress. The use of empirically-supported interventions is discussed from a multidimensional perspective with consideration for cultural context and adaptations necessary for particular client groups.
SOWK 4425
Positive and Community Youth Development
About this Course
This course provides an overview of the "community and positive youth development" approach to providing social services to children and adolescents. Many services for young people focus on negative outcomes such as behavior problems, pregnancy, violence, drug abuse, and truancy. These services are supposed to "fix" the small minority of kids who are "broken" in some way. The community and positive youth development perspective stresses that all youth need a variety of supports and opportunities to develop into healthy, contributing adults. This course considers how such an approach to social service delivery can be applied across different organizational settings (e.g., schools, government agencies, and non-profits) to promote the well-being of American youth from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Learn more about the Children & Youth: Risks and Healthy Development curriculum.
Key Faculty
Kimberly Bender
Professor, Associate Dean for Doctoral Education, and Interim Associate Provost for Research
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Children & Youth at GSSW
Implementation Science
GSSW’s Center for Effective Interventions brings the best of implementation science to community agencies, helping them to scale effective interventions for children and families.
Fostering Healthy Futures
The Fostering Healthy Futures program helps children who have been maltreated and placed in foster care to enter adolescence on a positive path. And as an evidence-based practice, the program expands knowledge about approaches to positive youth intervention.
Evaluating Child Welfare
In a community research partnership, the Butler Institute for Families at GSSW is working with Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Borough to improve its family visitation program for kids in out-of-home care.
Application Information
2020 Denver Campus MSW Program Final Application Deadline
