Since 1980 the Children's Hearings Project (CHP) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has offered status offenders and their families mediation as an alternative to the courts. This report describes CPH's origins and summarizes the results of an extensive research study conducted during the first 2 years of its operation. The key findings were: (1) mediation is most appropriate for cases involving stubborn and run-away children; (2) mediation introduces a new way of managing conflict between parents and adolescents; (3) mediation helps families learn new forms of dispute resolution despite long entrenched patterns of family conflict; (4) mediation can be adapted to take into account the unequal power of parents and children; (5) volunteer mediators can be trained to handle the complex family dynamics of status offender families; (6) parents and children were positive about the mediators; and (7) volunteer mediators in the United States differed from lay panel members in Scotland. It is argued that the findings point to the viability of dispute resolution techniques for status offenders and their families and could make it possible to divert large numbers of status offenders from the courts while creating alternative, structured setting within which family conflicts could be aired and resolved. Preferably, however, mediation should remain an adjunct to the court process rather than replacing it. (RDN)