This field guide, intended for social workers, discusses strategies for engaging families during visits. It begins by urging social workers to use a solution focused approach and identifies core conditions for developing a relationship with families, including demonstrating genuineness, empathy, respect, and competence. A practice wheel is presented that describes strategies for engaging, teaming, assessing, planning, intervening, and tracking and adjusting. Steps are then discussed for working with resistance and developing a working agreement, and tasks that a worker or support person can do to assist families through each stage of the process of change are also reviewed. Following sections of the guide address: skills for engaging families, including strategies for eliciting solutions, interviewing techniques to promote exploration, and solution-focused questions; the cycle of need and possible need statements; outcome indicators for safety, stability, well-being, and permanency; and safety and stability considerations. Link to Field Guide
Tag Archives: safety
Michigan Title IV-E Waiver Child Welfare Demonstration Project
Submitted to: Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, July 2012
Goals and Hypothesis: Michigan’s waiver demonstration will test the hypothesis that an array of intensive and innovative home-based preservation services tailored to the needs of individual families will prevent child abuse and neglect and decrease entry of children into foster care, and increase positive outcomes for children and families in their homes and communities and improve the safety and wellbeing of children. Over the life of the waiver, we expect a reduction in foster care maintenance expenditures and a commensurate increase in spending for services to safely maintain children in their own homes. Link to Waiver proposal
Talking to Children About Disasters
American Academy Of Pediatrics: Children can cope more effectively with a disaster when they feel they understand what is happening and what they can do to help protect themselves, family, and friends. Provide basic information to help them understand, without providing unnecessary details that may only alarm them. For very young children, provide concrete explanations of what happened and how it will affect them (eg, a tree branch fell on electrical wires and that is why the lights don’t work). Let children know there are many people who are working to help them and their community to recover after a disaster (such as repair crews for the electric company, or firefighters, police, paramedics, or other emergency personnel). Share with them all of the steps that are being taken to keep them safe; children will often worry that a disaster will occur again. Link to Article
America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2012
Each year since 1997, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics has published a report on the well-being of children and families. Pending data availability, the Forum updates all 41 indicators annually on its Web site (http://childstats.gov) and alternates publishing a detailed report, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, with a summary version that highlights selected indicators. The America’s Children series makes Federal data on children and families available in a nontechnical, easy-to-use format in order to stimulate discussion among data providers, policymakers, and the public. Link to Report on ChildStats Web Site; Link to pdf Report