1/2

Child Care in Practice – Special Issue on Strengths-based Practice in Child Welfare

Gabriel Tobin Smith discusses the article ‘A Strengths-based Approach to Supervised Visitation in Child Welfare’

My colleagues at the Devereux Center for Resilient Children and I, saw the call for papers for this Child Care in Practice special edition as an opportunity to describe a collaborative project we have been working on for some time with a partnering child welfare organisation, Scan Incorporated in Indiana. Our article describes the development and initial implementation of a strength-based approach within an integral child welfare service line in the United States. This service line visitation facilitation often called supervised visitation is relatively unarticulated in US government standards. Supervised visitation occurs to allow parents accused of abuse or neglect time with the children who have been removed from their care. The somewhat under defined nature of this practice area is what led our child welfare friends to search us out. The Devereux Center for Resilient Children is a branch under the umbrella of Devereux one of the largest non-profit behavioral health organisations in the United States. The Center for Resilient Children was established out of Devereux’s desire to promote the social and emotional well-being and resilience of all children and to prevent the increasing matriculation of young children into emotional and behavioral treatment centers. Our child welfare partners aimed to leverage our expertise in strength-based assessment strategies and research to articulate and evaluate a model for supervised visitation that would lead to more successful reunification of families and more stress hardy children. It is well documented that child maltreatment often occurs in a risk laden environment and is a significant risk factor in its own right, leading to negative outcomes such as increased likelihood of mental, emotional and behavioral problems stunted brain growth, developmental delays, academic difficulties, and criminal justice system involvement. While espousing the ideal of strength-based work, the nature of these challenges has lead the US child welfare system, like those of many other countries, to focus first on risk management and deficit based approaches like maintaining safety and solving problems, and second on promoting the general well-being of children and families. Despite this challenging context we believe that supervised visitation has the potential to promote permanency and improve the lives of children through strength-based work. This work includes supporting care giver skill acquisition, promoting relationships between children and care givers, and building within child protective factors for resilience. In our article we have explicitly articulated our approach to this work to help bridge the gap between conceptual understanding of strength-based and

2/2

resilience-enhancing practice and the actual provision of this type of strength-based services. The article describes our efforts to establish a foundation for this model through integrating research evidence and best practice literature, strength-based practice principles and insights from collaborating team members and staff. We then go on to describe six key aspects of the model that surfaced from this work, enhancement of the visit environment to promote family engagement and empowerment, strength-based assessment using the Devereux veining scales, resilience meetings between the workers and care givers to plan and set goals, establishment of visit routines to provide predictability and structure for children and families, activities to promote resilience through positive family interaction, and progress check-ups to collaboratively readjust goals and plans as needed. We also described the training and supervision program which supports quality implementation of this model. Our article recognises initial successes of the model such as positive experiences of staff and families, and general implementation fidelity, and feasibility overall. However, we also identify the challenges we have experienced in implementing this approach, including financial limitations, parent apprehension and the necessity of rapport building, shifting expectations of staff to become more engaged with families, and the restraints of visit time and location on consistently implementing the model with fidelity. The model described, referred to as the Sherman Program, after its benefactor, is still in the early stages of development and evaluation. We continue to refine it as we move towards a more comprehensive, randomised control study to establish its evidence base. However we believe the Sherman Program has value as an example of the application of strength based practice within the child welfare setting and hope that it will inspire further strength based resilience focused work with this at risk population.

Read the article A Strengths-based Approach to Supervised Visitation in Child Welfare

Read the Child Care in Practice special issue on Strength-based Practice in Child Welfare, Volume 20, Issue 1, 2014