Family involvement meetings: Engagement, facilitation, and child and family goals

Measuring Family-Centered Practice in Child Welfare

“…Furthermore, building mutual trust with families is warranted as some mistrust exists between families of color and child welfare agencies (Redd et al, 2005). Some evidence-based family-centered programs and strategies, such as FGDM, Kinship Navigator programs, and Family Connections programs, could be integrated to child welfare systems to improve family-centered practices (DePanfilis & Dubowitz, 2005; Rushovich et al, 2017; Xu et al, 2017).…”

“…Family-centered practice models have been implemented across the child welfare service continuum, including child maltreatment prevention and intervention, preserving families, and promoting permanency (Child Welfare Information Gateway, n.d.). Family Group Decision Making (FGDM), Kinship Navigator programs, and Family Connections programs are some well-known family practice models (O’Reilly et al, 2010; Rushovich et al, 2017; Xu et al, 2017). The FGDM can be used in any stage of child welfare services to engage family members, which aims to engage family members by focusing on the shared decision-making process between family members and professionals (Asscher et al, 2014; Levine, 2000).…”

“…To facilitate shared resources and responsibilities, an essential step is to respect the culture of the family, acknowledge family strengths, and involve family members in the decision-making process. Emerging research has shown that implementing family-centered practice increases family’s satisfaction with services (Ahn et al, 2018), helps fulfill children and families’ short-term goals (Xu et al, 2017), and prevents child maltreatment (DePanfilis & Dubowitz, 2005). Although family-centered practice has been widely implemented in the United States, there is a lack of valid and reliable measures to capture child welfare workers’ family-centered practices.…”

The effectiveness of a child day-care program in child welfare services

“…In sum, this program could have a more positive impact if it managed to involve different developmental agents and contexts (Cheng & Lo, 2016;Kim, Pierce, Jaggers, Imburgia, & Hall, 2016;Xu, Ahn, & Bright, 2017).…”