Recreating family: parents identify worker-client relationships as paramount in family preservation programs

Although existing family preservation program research has focused on identifying the components of effective treatment, we remain far from fully developing empirically supported interventions (Barth, Chamberlain, Reid, Rolls, Hurlburt, Farmer, James, McCabe, & Kohl, 2005; Dufour, Chamberland, & Trocme, 2003). The current longitudinal study expands existing efforts to understand the active ingredients of effective interventions by learning from parents who experienced a family preservation intervention themselves. The current study reports on the reflections of 35 parents who child protection social workers referred to family preservation programs. In contrast to a focus on intervention components, parents related the helpful interventions they received to the effectiveness of intervention processes -- namely, to the quality of the relationships they had with their individual family preservation workers and with service teams at the programs they attended. Parents identified that workers in effective programs used specific relational skills to recreate a nurturing family environment that fostered parent engagement and change throughout the process of intervention.