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Assistances in education are pedagogical and therapeutic benefits connected with it. For child guidance as an assistance in education therefore psychotherapeutic competence is constitutive. The article describes the professional and legal framework of a psychotherapy in child guidance. It specifies on the one hand the composition of the multi disciplinary team (including child and youth psychotherapists and psychological psychotherapists) and the additional therapeutic qualifications acquired by the skilled employees. On the other hand it traces the judicial border between a medical psychotherapy with its scientifically recognised psychotherapy procedures and methods and a psychotherapy in child guidance. The applicability of the new law on the rights of patients with its requirements on a contract governing medical treatment (standards of medical specialists, duty to provide information, information provided for self-determination as well as documentation) on child guidance is discussed as well. The author argues for the preservation of psychotherapeutic competence in child guidance as a benefit sui generis and sees precisely in its therapeutic competence its specific contribution to the advancement of the assistances in education.

Boys growing up in rural Gabon between 1900 and 1940 negotiated with many challenges: the rise of migrant labor, famines and hardships brought on by World War I, the growth of Christianity and African-based spiritual traditions, and the undermining of clans, which had been the main form of social and political organization in the nineteenth century. Parents, extended family members, missionaries, and European businesses recruited boys to serve their varied interests. Boys in turn developed new self-understandings by leaving their homes as students, workers, and clients of older men. This article examines the life histories of four boys to trace the successes and challenges that individual boys encountered in this turbulent era. Interestingly, older biological relatives of boys generally succeeded in maintaining their authority over children living far from home, although the education and wages that boys received forced older men to offer boys more benefits.

This study looks at multiracial boys and girls, often referred to as "half castes," in Nyasaland. It reconstructs the status and agency of these children by assessing the ways in which they maneuvered local African and European communities to explore opportunities that would improve their individual situations. At times they took initiative by writing letters to the Nyasaland administration for financial support. Furthermore, state responses to these letters provide evidence of how the state perceived these children, particularly the moral responsibility felt given that their fathers were often white settlers and at times colonial officials. This article also discusses the general challenges and opportunities that childhood experiences raise, with specific attention to the kind of subaltern social knowledge that such evidence presents--knowledge that challenges conventional visions of what constitutes history and who makes it.

This essay argues for a new religious ethical approach to fatherhood centered on children and their expanding capabilities for participation in society. Under the notion of "childism"—in analogy to feminism, womanism, humanism, and the like—it takes the perspective of the experiences and concerns of childhood as such. In contrast with a soft patriarchal argument for fatherhood that dominates much religious discourse today, it argues for a larger and more hopeful vision of fatherhood as directed toward the human social good. This requires, methodologically, a richer hermeneutical circle between religion and the social sciences. Substantively, it calls for Christian and other religious ethicists to re-imagine fatherhood as an integrated public–private responsibility that aims to cultivate children’s fully human social creativity as images of their Creator.

The children's and young people's assistance law authoritatively pointed out more clearly, what counselling in educational guidance services offered by the youth welfare can be. Then a difference is to be made between psychotherapy as a free offer made by educational guidance services and psychotherapy as a service offered by the medical care system and financed by the health insurance. Important criteria for discrimination can be deduced from the purposes of the children's an young people's assistance law and from their interpretations. The law demands a stronger pedagogical orientation, and it even demands an orientation towards underprivileged groups dealing with everyday matters. An analysis of the current practice confirms this trend. Meanwhile the educational guidance services have developed an independent methodology. Much more than the therapy offered by the medical care systems this therapy is marked by pragmatic purposes and a generic orientation. This therapy is getting more and more profiled on the basis of the children's and young people's assistance law still is lacking however a theory bringing it forward as well as systematics studies of their effects.

The central question of this article is whether the Law for Children and Youth Aid (Kinder- und Jugendhilfegesetz KJHG) from 1991 is justly accused of being more a Law for Parent Aid than a law in keeping with the times which also does justice to the problems and needs of children. The article especially pursues the question whether the legislator of the KJHG considers the precarious balance of a conflict between parental rights and children's welfare as required by the constitution. Whether the child's welfare is endangered in an individual case and which strategies to limit further dangers are promising can often only be answered in an interdisciplinary manner; competencies from child psychologists and child psychiatrists should be utilized more extensively to determine problems and find decisions in youth care.

The introduction of the law about youth services has led to a coming closer of educational guidance services and the other institutions for youth services. This development is leading to a new discussion about the relationship between the educational services and the youth welfare office. There is a danger, by specific laws, the traditional working principles of educational guidance services, such as voluntary use and easy accessibility, might lose their importance. But only than can educational guidance be helpful for the other youth services if its principles of working remain valid. By examples of certain cases is shown, how cooperation might work between educational services and youth welfare department. The article tries to show a means of how to fulfil the demands of participation as required by the youth welfare law on the one hand and how to preserve the special institution of educational guidance on the other hand at the same time.

This article is a revised version of a short expert opinion of the Ministry of Work, Health and Social Matters of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (West Germany) dealing with the rules of expert skills in educational counselling. After the attempt of clarifying terms (consultation, therapy, medicine) the processes of consultation and treatment are described in general as influencing in a communicative way, whereby common qualitative characteristics are pointed out. The author also goes into taking ethical principles into consideration, possibilities of preventive effectiveness and consequences for education and further training of experts working in educational counselling facilities.