The breakdown of the family has been blamed for many of today’s societal ills. Are there effective ways to support a family with problems (neglect, substance abuse, terminal illness, etc.), prevent its break up, and make a positive change? How effective has the Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) been at solving these kinds of family problems and situations? What about families that don’t respond to IFPS programs? Do the programs differ in their effectiveness? Through an exploration of these issues, knowledgeable contributors offer their own experiences as a basis for tracing the evolution of IFPS and of the advances that have been made in the field. Advancing Family Preservation Practice covers such topics as the evolution of family preservation and the theories that guide it, child protective services, clinician-support worker teams, and the relative effectiveness of family preservation services with neglectful families. Aimed at helping evaluators, practitioners, and administrators incorporate what has been discovered in IFPS practice, Advancing Family Preservation Practice is an important resource for those involved in the development, implementation, and evaluation of family programs.
The issues [covered in Advancing Family Preservation Practice] are very relevant to the debates that are going on across the country among administrators, advocates, and legislators, as states are struggling to balance budgets with fewer federal dollars and skyrocketing costs for mandated health and social welfare programs. Support for preventive services will only continue to be available if these programs can be shown to be both successful in preventing family dissolution and cost-effective. Advancing Family Preservation Practice provides the most extensive documentation to date on potential program benefits of intensive family preservation services using program descriptions and research findings from established practice centers across the country. Policymakers and practitioners need to read this book. Faced with the task of providing a safe alternative to foster care for children who have been abused or neglected, the material compiled in this text is essential to a realistic assessment of potential outcomes for children and families at high risk.
–Linda Heisner, Director Office of Family & Children’s Services, Maryland Department of Human Resources, Baltimore
This is a scholarly, down-to-earth book for all those who serve children and their parents. Bold, imaginative and practical, this volume crosses those disciplinary lines that separate social work, medicine, nursing, psychology, law, and education; and it captures how paraprofessionals function as supervised experts in transmitting the hands-on knowledge from all these disciplines into front-line, state-of-the-art, home-centered services for children at risk of losing their parents and their vitality. This book is a vital resource because it packs hard-earned empirical knowledge into an upward spiral of rediscovering and innovating community-based, home-centered services for disadvantaged children and their parents; and for those dedicated adults who have the competence and the passion to serve them.
–Albert J. Solnit, M.D., Sterling Professor Emeritus, Yale University and Commissioner, Department of Mental Health, Connecticut