Suchergebnisse

Working with children and families experiencing child maltreatment requires that a practitioner understand the family: their risks, their needs, their strengths, and the goals of the intervention. Therefore, many of the tools and training topics that support this work focus on family and child assessment. The purposes of a thorough assessment are to understand the immediate circumstances so that children are protected, and interventions are relevant to the child and family's circumstances and events. This paper presents a new assessment tool that is ecologically oriented, empirically based, and able to provide a continuous assessment of the child and family that can chart improvements and declines over the life of a case.

A process study was performed on a program that was designed to prevent ineffective foster placement, to determine the match between family problems identified during assessment and subsequent services provided to the family. The individualization and "fit" of services to specific family needs is the foundation of assessment practice, but little research has documented the extent to which fit occurs. This study of 115 families and their services found that fit is best when concrete, rather than clinical, services are provided, but that parenting issues continue to drive the provision of all services.

Intensive family preservation services are a specialized form of child welfare services based on the proposition that an intensive, multisystemic intervention can bolster the family's internal and external resources and prevent further child maltreatment and the need for placement of children into foster care. Research on child maltreatment has identified social isolation as a primary correlate of child abuse and neglect but has also found that informal social support from family and friends can be detrimental to family integrity. Formal pychoeducational support groups are presented and described as an alternative method to create supportive networks for families seeking to remain safe and remain together.