Family
preservation does not mean what critics say it means.
The
term "family preservation" has a very specific meaning. It refers to
a systematic determination of those families in which children could remain in
their homes or be returned home safely, and provision of the services needed to
ensure that safety. The term refers to programs which rigorously follow a
series of policies and procedures pioneered by the first such program,
Homebuilders, in Washington State.
Among
those policies and procedures:
· The intervention begins when
the family is in crisis. A Homebuilders intervention is designed for families
whose children otherwise face imminent removal to foster care.
· The intervention is short --
usually four to six weeks -- but extremely intense.
Family
preservation has been falsely characterized as a "quick fix." In fact
Homebuilders workers have caseloads of no more than three [1], so though they are with a family for no more than six weeks,
they can spend several hours at a time with that family -- often equivalent to
a year of conventional "counseling."
Furthermore,
the end of the intervention does not mean the end of support for the family. The
Homebuilders model requires that the family be linked to less intensive support
after the intervention to maintain the gains made by the family.
· The worker spends her or his
time in the family's home, so she can see the family in action -- and so the
family doesn't have the added burden of going to the worker's office. The
worker gives his or her home phone number to the family and is on call 24 hours
a day.
· The worker begins with the
problems the family identifies, rather than patronizing the family and
dismissing their concerns.
· Workers are trained in
several different approaches to helping families, so they don't become hostile
to those families if their first attempts to help don't work.
· But perhaps most important,
family preservation workers combine traditional counseling and parent education
with a strong emphasis on providing "hard" services to ameliorate the
worst aspects of poverty.
Family
preservation workers help families find day care and job training, and get
whatever special educational help the children may require. They teach
practical skills and help with financial problems. They even do windows. Faced
with a family living in a dirty home, a family preservation worker will not
lecture the parents or demand that they spend weeks in therapy to deal with the
deep psychological trauma of which the dirty home is "obviously" just
a symptom. The family preservation worker will roll up her or his sleeves and
help with the cleaning.
This
has a number of benefits:
· First and foremost, poverty
is the single best predictor of actual child maltreatment, and broad, vague
laws make it easy to confuse poverty itself with "neglect" (See Issue Paper 6). A few hundred dollars in "flexible
funds" for a security deposit on an apartment in a better neighborhood may
be the most important "therapy" a family needs.
· Once basic survival needs are
taken care of, a troubled parent can start to work on other problems. It's a
lot easier to concentrate on how to be the best possible parent when you’re not
worrying about where your next meal is coming from or whether your family is
about to be evicted.
· By providing the concrete
help a family says it needs, family preservation workers set themselves apart
from many of the "helping" professionals parents have dealt with.
They have proven they can deliver. Where everything had seemed hopeless, the
family preservation worker has provided hope. That makes the parents more
receptive to the worker's ideas for how the parents can do their part to make
the family work.
What
Family Preservation is not
In
recent years, other safe, effective programs to keep families together have
emerged, and they are discussed in NCCPR's publication Twelve Ways to do Child
Welfare Right. But the child savers have given family preservation a
new meaning: all purpose scapegoat. They have slapped the label onto any child
abuse death anywhere under any circumstances.
Agencies
have eagerly embraced this scapegoating, since it is far safer for them to
blame a law or policy that supposedly mandates "family preservation"
than to admit that a child died because of their own bungling or budget cuts
(See Issue Papers 8 and 9).
Updated January 1, 2008
1. Some critics of family preservation set up a straw
man by first claiming that family preservation workers can have caseloads as
high as six, and then saying such programs don't work. A program with a
caseload of six is not a family preservation intervention. Back to Text.