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Overview
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
- Key elements
- Practice approaches
- Across the service continuum
- Creating a family-centered agency culture
- Frequently asked questions
Introduction to Family-Centered Practice: A Curriculum
National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections (2010)
Addresses the principles of permanency, assessment, case planning, participatory goal setting, and family engagement.