June 2017Vol. 18, No. 4Print issueSpotlight on Reunification

When birth parents are reunified with their child after foster care placement, they often need in-home support services to help prevent any recurrence of maltreatment leading to the child's reentry into foster care. This study in the journal Children and Youth Services Review reports on the findings from a randomized control trial of the 10-week home visiting program, Promoting First Relationships (PFR). The present study focuses on young children from birth to three years of age, as this population of children comprise one-third of first entries into foster care, which is a higher than any other age group.

This study included a subsample of 43 reunified birth parents and children who were originally part of a larger sample of participants in the Fostering Families Project, which was a study that assessed the effectiveness of the PFR program from April 2007 to March 2010. For the purposes of the current study, the subsample of parents and children were randomly assigned to with the PFR protocol (18 parent-child dyads) or a psychoeducational program developed for this study called early education support (EES) (25 parent-child dyads).

The PFR group participated in 10 weekly 60- to 75-minute in-home visits by trained providers from community mental health agencies. The PFR protocol comprised a manualized but flexible curriculum combined with video feedback, worksheets and handouts, and a strengths-based orientation to promote more sensitive parenting. The parents in the EES group participated in a 90-minute in-home session once a month for three months delivered by an early education specialist. These sessions included guidance on early childhood developmental issues as well as referral to service programs such as child care, housing, and mental health.  

The authors hypothesized that the parent-child dyads in the PFR group would show improvements in understanding their toddler's behavior and parental sensitivity and support; reductions in perceiving the child as difficult, having behavioral problems, and reporting a dysfunctional parent-child relationship; and increases in observed child self-regulation and engagement with parents. The results show that although there were no significant differences between parents and children in the PFR group and the EES group immediately after the study posttest, after six months the PFR group showed positive results, indicating that a longer time was required for the intervention to effect change.

When children are placed in out-of-home care, eventual reunification is the goal, when appropriate. However, successfully reunifying parents with their children can be challenging. Parents and their children must transition from spending limited time together, often with supervised visitation, to becoming a full-time family again. Parents have reported this as a time of joy mixed with anxiety as well as feeling disappointment at the perceived lack of support from the child welfare system. The implications of this study are that participating in the PFR program before reunification, during visitation times, and then continuing with PFR as a support postreunification is a model that could be effective in alleviating the stress involved with reunification as well as help to prevent reentry in to the foster care system. The authors suggest that PFR would be a good addition to the services that should be offered by state agencies to strengthen the parent-child relationship.

"Promoting birth parents' relationships with their toddlers upon reunification: Results from Promoting First Relationships home visiting program," by Monica L. Oxford, Maureen Marcenko, Charles B. Fleming, Mary Jane Lohr & Susan J. Spieker, Children and Youth Services Review, 61, 2016, is available through ScienceDirect at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740915301183.

 

Children thrive in supportive environments that prepare them to deal with life's challenges. According to a new research brief from Child Trends and the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), programs and services that help children flourish demand a credible means of defining, measuring, and monitoring what that means. The brief was designed to spur the development of a concrete and reliable set of measures for assessing whether young children are thriving.

The authors defined "flourishing" as children's success across all five distinct developmental domains: physical health and functioning, mental and emotional well-being, social behavior, cognitive and academic development, and relationships. Since well-being is holistic in nature, it is not enough for a child to thrive in one of the five domains while struggling in others.

The authors recommend the development of measures for the following to determine whether young children are flourishing:

• Self-regulation: A child's ability to control emotions/impulses and exert self-control
• Attachment: A child's positive relationship with a parent or a caregiver
• Engagement or approaches to learning: Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement and interest and curiosity
• Communication: A child's ability to express needs and wants verbally and non-verbally and listen and respond to others

The authors also recommend the following measures of risk and protective factors:

• Positive parenting skills: Authoritative parenting
• Conflict-resolution skills within families: Nonviolent strategies for resolving differences
• Social support for parents: The ability of parents to form relationships with other adults
• Community cohesion: Environment that helps parents meet basic needs and that encourages social bonds

The research brief offers a conceptual model for defining and achieving well-being that considers the following:

• The multiple contexts that affect how children learn and grow (e.g., neighborhoods, early childcare and education settings)
• Promotive and protective factors (individual, family, and community)
• Risk factors (biological, psychological, family, community, and cultural)
• Supports and services (e.g., Head Start; home visiting; Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children)

The research brief, Flourishing From the Start: What Is It and How Can It Be Measured?, was supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and by the Health Resources and Services Administration through contracts with Child Trends and CAHMI at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The research brief is available at https://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2017-16FlourishingFromTheStart-1.pdf (1,050 KB).
 

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) revised its Standards and Indicators for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice to reflect the growing need for cultural competence and the importance of social workers' ethical responsibility to be culturally competent. This revision was developed by the 2015 NASW National Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity. It expands upon previous work by introducing new concepts and also broadens the understanding in other areas, such as culture being inclusive of designations, such as disability, rather than only race and ethnicity.

The goals of these revised standards include the following:

• Enhance knowledge, skills, and values in practice and policy development in relation to culturally diverse populations
• Specify standards to guide growth, learning, and assessment in the area of cultural competence
• Establish indicators that help social workers in all areas of practice monitor and evaluate culturally competent practice and policies with regard to these standards
• Educate consumers, government agencies, insurance carriers, and others about the profession’s standards for culturally competent practice
• Maintain or improve the quality of culturally competent services provided by social workers in agencies, programs, and private practice settings
• Inform specific ethical guidelines for culturally competent social work practice in agency and private practice settings
• Document standards for agencies, peer-review committees, state regulatory bodies, insurance carriers, and others

The revised standards also introduce the concepts of intersectionality (i.e., examining experiences of discrimination, oppression, and domination) and cultural humility to help social workers understand the complex experiences of minorities and those who have been marginalized. In addition, the updated document highlights the importance of communication issues among the populations being served, such as limited English proficiency, low literacy, and disabilities.

To read Standards and Indicators for Cultural Competence in the Social Work Practice, visit https://www.socialworkers.org/practice/standards/naswculturalstandards.pdf (244 KB).
 

Outcomes for families and children involved with child welfare are highly dependent on program and system factors and how well available services function. These factors include adequacy and appropriateness of funding, caseloads, workforce development, and system policies. Wraparound Implementation and Practice Quality Standards is a brief produced through a collaboration between the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the National Technical Assistance Network for Children's Behavioral Health, the National Wraparound Initiative, and the National Wraparound Implementation Center. It provides information on the ever-changing field of wraparound services and systems of care by building on previous work by the National Wraparound Initiative. The brief focuses on a summary of research-, theory-, and practice-based standards regarding five implementation-related areas and two output-related areas.

These seven areas are central to developing and implementing wraparound services and should adhere to the following standards:

• Implementation Related
  • Competent staff—Wraparound service organizations should maintain a stable workforce of qualified personnel hired through a rigorous process that begins with high-quality written job descriptions. The process should also include an interview and selection protocols that include behavioral questions or direct observation of tasks and require a writing exercise or sample. These staff should also be effectively trained, fulfill an initial apprenticeship before taking on a full caseload, and participate in ongoing coaching and performance assessments.
  • Effective leadership—Supervisors should be inspiring, thoughtful, and innovative. They should provide well-defined performance goals while also insuring staff have the resources they need to meet those goals. Leaders should also provide transparent procedures for decision-making within the wraparound provider organization as well as be able to address and find solutions for wraparound implementation barriers as they arise.
  • Facilitative organizational support—Workers should be given manageable caseloads of 8–12 families or fewer, and supervisors should manage only six or fewer workers. Staff should also be adequately compensated commensurate to their experience and have the physical resources they need to perform their jobs. The wraparound provider organization should have a sustainable funding plan for the next three to five years.
  • Utility-focused accountability mechanisms—The wraparound provider should routinely evaluate trainings in order to continuously improve upon existing methods, practice effective data management, routinely monitor adherence to the wraparound model, and monitor youth and family outcomes as well as service costs and savings.
  • Hospitable system conditions—Wraparound programs should serve the appropriate populations, namely youth at risk of out-of-home placement or those with the most complex needs. These services should also be adequately publicized, available, and accessible to the target population and feature a robust array of services and supports, such as intensive in-home services, mentoring, respite, family and youth peer support, and mobile crisis response and stabilization. In addition, all agencies involved in the wraparound program should coordinate their work with the various partner agencies and providers and implement a single wraparound plan for each youth and family.
• Outcome Related
  • Fidelity: High-quality wraparound practice—Youth and families referred to wraparound services should be engaged in the program within 10 days of the referral. All wraparound providers should work together to develop, implement, and monitor the individualized service plans, and all team members should take ownership of their assigned tasks.
  • Outcomes: Improved youth and family functioning—Successful outcomes include improved functioning in school, the community, and within the family. They should also include increased caregiver confidence and a stable living environment for youth. These all lead to a positive exit from wraparound services.

These wraparound standards may be used in a variety of ways, including as a guided self-assessment of wraparound program quality, providing structure to the planning process, assisting in choosing data elements to incorporate into a continuous quality improvement program, and informing performance-based contracting.

To read Wraparound Implementation and Practice Quality Standards, visit http://files.constantcontact.com/57c33206301/883cc58f-df88-485d-971a-23feb6c34765.pdf (343 KB).
 

As the United States becomes more culturally diverse, service providers—namely community-based organizations (CBOs)—and their funders have increasingly recognized the need to deliver more culturally responsive services and incorporate cultural competency in the way they work with the youth and families they serve. Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches to Serving Diverse Populations: A Resource Guide for Community-Based Organizations, produced by the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, is intended to help CBOs and other stakeholders easily find and access available resources based on cultural competency to better serve the diverse populations with which they work. It is also intended to help CBOs develop high-quality and successful applications in response to funding announcements.

The guide addresses several topics related to building a culturally competent social program, including how to choose interventions for diverse populations; how to conduct needs assessments that include input from community members to better understand their needs; measurement considerations related to program fidelity and satisfaction for diverse populations, such as cultural and linguistic appropriateness of interviews, surveys, and standardized assessments; collaboration through a diversity lens among individuals and organizations, particularly those with complementary areas of expertise; the importance of a culturally diverse workforce; and the cost of CBOs responding to the needs of diverse populations. These topics all have financial implications for CBOs responding to funding announcements since some announcements may require applicants to specifically address issues related to cultural competency in the proposed budget.

The guide also provides resources that CBOs and the child welfare agencies partnering with them can consult to develop or improve their cultural competency within their programs and services. This will enable them to better serve and target the needs of the growing number of multicultural, multilingual children and families in the United States. Tables at the end of each section provide useful links to specific resources that correspond to each topic.

The complete guide, Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches to Serving Diverse Populations: A Resource Guide for Community-Based Organizations, is available at http://www.hispanicresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Cultural-Competence-Guide.pdf (5,690 KB).

A new report that examines 25 distinct industries and services most commonly implicated in human trafficking cases seeks to expand the understanding and recognition of modern slavery. The report is the product of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that is dedicated to eradicating modern slavery by exposing human-trafficking networks, their perpetrators, and their victims.

The March 2017 report, The Typology of Modern Slavery: Defining Sex and Labor Trafficking in the United States, is the result of data collected by the Polaris Project from 32,000 documented cases of human trafficking between December 2007 and December 2016. Polaris collected the data through its operation of the BeFree Textline and the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The report represents the largest data set on human trafficking ever compiled and analyzed. It accounts for victim gender and nationality as well as whether the victims were adults or minors. Children and youth are vulnerable to human trafficking, making this report a valuable resource for parents, caregivers, and those working in child welfare.

The 25 types of trafficking outlined in the report represent diverse domains, including health care, forestry and logging, landscaping, hotels and hospitality, carnivals, escort services, and commercial cleaning services. The report emphasizes that there are many ways for individuals to be exploited and explains that each type of human trafficking has its own business model, unique recruitment strategies, victim profiles, and methods of control that facilitate the crime.

The report points out that only 16 percent of the reported trafficking cases involved labor trafficking and that the National Human Trafficking Hotline and BeFree Textline received fewer calls about labor trafficking than sex trafficking. The report also emphasizes that, globally, forced labor is thought to be more prevalent than sex trafficking. The authors contend that labor-trafficking cases are underreported in the United States due to a lack of awareness and a fundamental misunderstanding of the significant vulnerability of workers in many U.S. labor sectors.

The Typology of Modern Slavery: Defining Sex and Labor Trafficking in the United States is available at http://polarisproject.org/sites/default/files/Polaris-Typology-of-Modern-Slavery.pdf (4,700 KB).
 

Upcoming national conferences on child welfare and adoption from June through August 2017 include the following:

June 2017

• One Child, Many Hands: A Multidisciplinary Conference on Child Welfare
  Field Center for Children's Policy, Practice & Research at the University of Pennsylvania
  June 7–9, Philadelphia, PA
  http://www.onechildmanyhands.org

• Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) Summit
  Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center
  June 20–22, Rogers, AR
  https://www.gundersenhealth.org/ncptc/trainings-education/violence-intervention-prevention-summit

July 2017

• Child Welfare Virtual Expo 2017: Strengthening Assessment and Decision-Making for Improved Outcomes
  Capacity Building Center for States
  July 13, 2017, online, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. EDT
  https://capacity.childwelfare.gov/virtualexpo/

• National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges 80th Annual Conference
  National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
  July 16–19, Washington, DC
  http://www.ncjfcj.org/80th-annual-conference

• Family Focused Treatment Association 31st Annual Conference
  Family Focused Treatment Association
  July 16–19, Chicago, IL
  http://www.ffta.org/conference

• North American Council on Adoptable Children 43rd Annual Conference
  North American Council on Adoptable Children
  July 19–22, Atlanta, GA
  http://www.nacac.org/conference/conference.html

August 2017

• 29th Annual Crimes Against Children Conference
  Dallas Children's Advocacy Center and the Dallas Police Department
  August 7–10, Dallas, TX
  http://www.cacconference.org/

• 14th Annual National Drug Endangered Children Conference
  National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children
  August 29–31, Green Bay, WI
  http://www.nationaldec-conference.org
   

 

The California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare produced the training webinar "Leadership and Organizational Change for Implementation," which focuses on training managers and supervisors to become effective leaders, to create a positive implementation climate within their organizations, and to successfully lead their teams in evidence-based practice implementation.

The webinar features Gregory A. Aarons, Ph.D., from the Child & Adolescent Services Research Center at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Aarons discusses the need for training effective implementation leaders due to the shortcomings in successful program implementation. Research has shown a 55 percent failure rate for implemented home-based treatment, and recent reviews of dissemination and implementation research in child and adolescent mental health found that only 10 percent of these review articles were considering the long-term sustainment of evidence-based interventions.

In the webinar, Dr. Aarons illustrates the four domains of implementation leadership:

1. Knowledgeable about the evidence-based program and can answer questions from staff about the specific program being implemented
2. Supportive of staff in the implementation of the evidence-based program
3. Proactive in problem solving during and after the implementation process
4. Perseverant throughout the implementation process

The Implementation Leadership Scale, a 12-question self-assessment based on these four domains, identifies specific behaviors that leaders can enact to support and engage their staff in the larger goal of evidence-based practice implementation. It also focuses on leadership behaviors related to climate-embedding mechanisms to promote strategic climates.

To view the complete webinar "Leadership and Organizational Change for Implementation," visit http://www.cebc4cw.org/cebc-webinars/cebc-sponsored-webinars/leadership-and-organizational-change-for-implementation/.