The Parent Partner program is one of a number of recent innovations in child welfare that draws upon the strengths of families and engages family and community members in program planning. As a departure from previous initiatives, the Parent Partner program seeks to enlist as staff, mothers and fathers who have experienced child removal, services, and reunification. These individuals are trained and supported to provide direct services to parent clients seeking reunification with their children. The program design in Contra Costa County encourages Parent Partners to serve as mentors, guides, and advocates for current parent clients. Parent Partners can be flexible in the roles they play and in responding to a range of needs parent clients might present. The principal goal of their work, however, is to help parent clients gain awareness of their rights and responsibilities, and to assist parents toward reunification with their children. Because of their unique experience as former clients of the child welfare system, Parent Partners offer a perspective to parent clients that differs from that of social workers and other allied professionals. As one staff member indicated, “The message is the gift of hope: If I can do it, you can do it, too.” When parents are separated from their children, courts usually require evidence of significant change in parents before recommendations to reunify are offered. The path to facilitate parental change is assumed to occur via the parent’s engagement in services including parenting education, drug and alcohol treatment, mental health counseling, or other supports. In fact, according to Smith (2001), parental compliance with services is one of the most important predictors of reunification. Yet little is known about the factors that help parents engage in services. Acting largely as brokers of services, social workers attempt to offer referrals to services; sometimes time permits social workers to actively assist parents in connecting to services. But there is an acknowledged social distance between the social worker and the parent client. Differences of class, education, parenting status, or prior contact with the child welfare system may contribute to parent clients’ feelings of isolation and helplessness as they face a steep set of externally imposed requirements. Parent Partners, selected because of the successes they have experienced in overcoming significant obstacles, in changing patterns of personal behavior that diminished their parenting skills, and in acknowledging the role of child welfare in motivating them to re-prioritize their family, are viewed as important allies in the Contra Costa County Child and Family Service Agency. Because of their shared experience with the child welfare system, Parent Partners may be uniquely positioned to reach out to parent clients, gain their trust, and help them access services and negotiate the complicated child welfare bureaucracy. The purpose of this two-part research project is to: (1) describe the Parent Partner Program by identifying components of the program that are beneficial to parent clients and affiliated professionals; and (2) to understand the relationship between the Parent Partner intervention and reunification outcomes.
CITATION STYLE
McCroskey, J. (2011). Commentary on “Partnering with Parents: Promising Approaches to Improve Reunification Outcomes for Children in Foster Care.” Journal of Family Strengths, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.58464/2168-670x.1023
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