Family-centered practice is a way of working with families, both formally and informally, across service systems to enhance their

capacity to care for and protect their children. It focuses on the needs and welfare of children within the context of their families and communities. Family-centered practice recognizes the strengths of family relationships and builds on these strengths to achieve optimal outcomes. Family is defined broadly to include birth, blended, kinship, and foster and adoptive families.

Family-centered practice includes a range of strategies, including advocating for improved conditions for families, supporting them, stabilizing those in crisis, reunifying those who are separated, building new families, and connecting families to the resources that will sustain them in the future.

Philosophy & Values of Family-Centered Practice

Family-centered practice is based upon these core values:

The best place for children to grow up is in families. Providing services that engage, involve, strengthen, and support families is the most effective approach to ensuring children's safety, permanency, and well-being.

Family-centered practice is characterized by mutual trust, respect, honesty, and open communication between parents and service providers. Families are active participants in the development of policy, program design, and evaluation, and they are active decision-makers in selecting services for themselves and their children. Family and child assessment is strengths-based and solution-focused. Services are community-based and build upon informal supports and resources.

Key Elements of Family-Centered Practice

Key components of family-centered practice include:

Working with the family unit to ensure the safety and well-being of all family members Strengthening the capacity of families to function effectively Engaging, empowering, and partnering with families throughout the decision- and goal-making processes Providing individualized, culturally responsive, flexible, and relevant services for each family Linking families with collaborative, comprehensive, culturally relevant, community-based networks of supports and services

Family-Centered Practice Approaches

Family-centered, community-based principles are at the heart of a number of practice approaches being implemented across program areas and service systems. These approaches are used at different points in the helping process for purposes of assessment, case planning, and decision-making, and to address identified needs and concerns. Some are developed to address a specific population, such as substance-involved families or families of prisoners.

Family group decision-making approaches Neighborhood-based foster care Alternative response Shared family care Family mediation Family-centered substance abuse treatment Services to children and families of prisoners Other family-centered practice approaches