NUMBER 147 7 NOVEMBER 2002   INVOLVEMENT OF FAMILIES
INDEX OF QUOTES

	If the residential treatment center is to be seen as a temporary support for families in crises, rather than as a substitute for families that have failed, it must engage families as full and equal partners in the helping process. Traditionally, and for a variety of reasons, parents have been kept at arms length from the process of treatment in institutional settings. In the Challenge of Partnership (Maluccio and Sinanoglu 1981), the contributors document a variety of ways in which parents of children in foster and residential care can assume a meaningful role in helping. These include parenting skills training; family-support groups; family participation in the life-space of the residential institution; and family therapy {Whittaker 1981). As in adoption and foster family care, the enormous potential helping power of parents has only barely been touched. Without a strong family intervention component, it is doubtful that any model of out-of-home treatment (including TFC) can improve significantly on the rather meager results emerging from earlier outcome studies with respect to ultimate community reintegration. Again, the question of which setting group care or TFC encourages greater parental involvement remains to be tested empirically. Residential treatment, as an intervention, is best viewed as part of an overall continuum of care, which includes home-based, family-centered programs designed to prevent unnecessary out-of-home placement; services designed to reunite separated children and families; specialized adoption services; family support and education programs; and the kinds of therapeutic foster care programs that provide the basis for this monograph. These services are best viewed as complementary, though the precise relationships among them with respect to such matters as criteria for intake are anything but clear at this time. In all areas of youth services we possess only primitive technologies of change and even more primitive methodologies for measuring their effects.
	JAMES WHITTAKER and ANTHONY MALUCCIO Whittaker, J.J. and Maluccio, A.N. (1989)  Changing paradigms in residential services for disturbed/disturbing children: Retrospect and prospect.  In Hawkins, R.P. and Breilling, J. (eds.) Therapeutic Foster care: Critical Issues. Washington DC: CWLA, pp.81-102

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

KMaluccio, A.N. and Sinanoglu, P. (eds.) (1981). The Challenge of Partnership: Working with Parents in Foster Care. New York: CWLA
Whittaker, J.K. (1981) Family involvement in residential care: A support system for biological parents. In The Challenge of Partnership: Working with Parents in Foster Care. edited by A.N. Maluccio and P. Sinanoglu, 67-89. New York: CWLA

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