Individualized care is a total system of care that is tailored to a child with severely maladjusted behavior. The services are unconditional, flexible, child and family focused, and interagency coordinated. The services follow the child until the child is adjusting in a normalized, mainstream environment. Individualized care is illustrated through two different projects. One is the Alaska Youth Initiative where individualized care was used to return children from out-of-state, residential programs. The other is Project Wraparound where it was used to prevent children from being removed from their families. This paper begins with the principles of individualized care and then describes the ecological, multilevel assessment process that coincides with the delivery of services. A case example from Project Wraparound is provided for clarification. Following the case example is a discussion of the need for evaluation data with some suggested strategies for documenting effectiveness. The final section focuses on two barriers to the implementation of individualized care. One is the tendency to think in terms of component programs rather than individualized services. The other barrier is the competition for scarce resources. Strategies are presented for overcoming both barriers.

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Mentally retarded and nonretarded perceiver children (n = 40) conversed by telephone with a child who was described as a special or regular education student. Perceivers reported that special and regular education telephone partners behaved differently during the conversation even though observers who were unaware of how telephone partners had been described did not detect behavioral differences between them. These same observers did detect differences in stereotyperelated social behaviors of mentally retarded and nonretarded perceivers, but only when perceivers thought they were speaking to a regular education student. Observer ratings also suggested that nonretarded perceivers "talked down" to special education telephone partners. These results suggest that stereotypes about children with and without learning problems may become self-fulfilling prophecies by altering how children treat one another and by affecting how they interpret each other's behaviors.One important development in understanding children's educational experiences is the discovery of the Pygmalion effect (Rosenthal &Jacobson, 1968). The finding that teachers' expectations could affect children's academic performance stimulated vast amounts of research aimed at establishing (or challenging) the replicability and generalizability of this phenomenon and identifying the variables that mediate it (Braun).Other researchers realized that self-fulfilling prophecies might be important in situations far removed from teacher-student classroom interactions. These researchers began to show how expectations about self and others could dramatically affect the course and outcome of adult social interactions in nonacademic settings. Expectancy confirmation has since become a core concept in several major