Exploring the Experiences of Child Welfare-Focused Therapeutic Service Providers

Abstract

The importance of mental and behavioral health for child welfare clients is well-documented; yet, little is known about the challenges therapeutic service providers (TSPs) experience working in child welfare practice. To explore this topic, five focus groups were conducted with 40 TSPs in a contracted mental and behavioral health agency and data were analyzed following an inductive thematic process. Eleven primary challenges were identified, including the difficulty of navigating numerous involved parties, an overwhelmed work environment, legal intersections common to child welfare cases, unrealistic agency expectations, and heighten case complexity when working with child welfare populations. Findings are organized across system, agency, and client levels and add to the understanding of TSP perspectives working with child welfare. Targeted interventions are discussed, such as efforts to promote realistic expectations and training strategies, as well as directions for future research to improve the intersection between child welfare and mental and behavioral health.

Variation in Evidence-Based Practices Among Youth-Serving Residential Treatment Facilities

“…Effective family therapy in RT is essential to the health and well-being of children and their families (Sunseri, 2020). Depending on the child’s circumstance, family therapy may be complex and look different depending on the family composition (e.g., extended family, unrelated members, or mentors; Colvin & Thompson, 2020). Family therapy fits into the family engagement paradigm because youth tend to fare better after discharge when families improve their communication and relationships (Robst et al, 2014).…”

“They’re not bad parents. They’ve just made bad choices.”: Mental health clinicians’ perspectives of parents involved with child protective services

“…These professionals often provide CPS-involved parents with counseling and therapy services (Estefan et al, 2012), assisting them in gaining a sense of safety and support, motivation for change, and problem resolution skills (Yoo et al, 2020). However, their voices have received significantly less research attention than those of child welfare workers and clients (Colvin and Thompson, 2020). Although clinicians treating CPS clients work toward resolving child maltreatment like other CPS professionals do, their services are therapeutic in nature and thus grant them access to clients' personal accounts of their life experiences, values behind their parenting choices, and perceptions of their current CPS involvement.…”

“…While the benefit of mental health services for CPS-involved parents has been suggested (Lietz, 2009;Staudt and Massengale, 2015), there is a dearth of research on such services in the child welfare literature. In particular, little is known about mental health clinicians' perspectives on child abuse/neglect cases, compared to the amount of knowledge regarding child welfare workers' and CPS-involved families' perspectives (Colvin and Thompson, 2020). This raises concern in that mental health clinicians' voices are needed to facilitate effective collaboration between child protection and mental health services (Darlington and Feeney, 2008;Sheehan, 2004).…”