Family Services
Education. Stability. Advocacy.
Foster Care Prevention
The goal of this non-clinical service is to
provide support and advocacy for families that have been identified as high risk for removal due to family destabilization. This service is a higher level of intervention and parent education is often included in prevention services. Foster care prevention services can also support the family in navigating the requirements of a CHINS.
This service can include basic parent education, home stability support, and educational sanitation support for the home as well as the family members. This service focuses on the family as a whole and can include meeting with parents or children separately, checking in with children at school, and assisting with appointments when necessary.
Parent Education
This service can also be labeled as parent mentoring. This non-clinical service is intended to promote healthy relationships and safe environments for children and their families. Support is provided to the parents to empower their parenting abilities with the necessary education and skills to address the specific needs of their children. Topics are differentiated for each family and include but are not limited to, child development and milestones, attachment, co-parenting, trauma-informed parenting, positive parenting, feedback from supervised visitation, structure, limits, and boundaries as well as home stability support. Home stability support includes employment assistance, appropriate housing support, and budgeting education.
Therapeutic Mentoring
The goal of this non-clinical service offers structured strength-based support services for youth (21 and under.) This service addresses daily living, social-emotional, and communication needs through coaching, modeling, and relationship-building. This service focuses on empowering the individual by educating age appropriate-behaviors, interpersonal communication, problem-solving, and conflict resolution while assisting the individual with relating appropriately to other children and adolescents.
Casey Life Skills Mentoring:
For youth over 14 years old, RFS includes a Casey Life Skills Assessment. Using the Casey Life Skills assessment, the youth’s behaviors and competencies are assessed to determine deficiencies and long-term goals. CLS Mentoring focuses on supporting youth while establishing the life skills needed to set youth on their way towards developing resiliency and establishing healthy, productive lives.
Learn more about the Casey Life Skills Assessment: Here
Coparenting Support
Coparenting is a non-clinical service that assists separated parents with their relationship to assure that their children are parented in a healthy environment. Sessions focus on the emotional effects of separation, emotional, and behavioral reactions of separation by children, and parenting issues related to specific developmental stages. The service supports parents with conflict management, family stabilization, and the maintenance of financial responsibilities.
Coparenting Support is not couples therapy.
Interactive Parenting Support
(Supervised Visitation)
Also called Supervised Visitation, Interactive Parenting Support services strive to encourage positive and active interactions between parents and children.
Visits may take place in the home, RFS office, or community setting. Different levels of supervision may be offered to meet the needs of the family including in-room sight and sound supervision, or out-of-room supervision through a monitoring system.
Academic Support
Academic Support aids students who need additional assistance in reaching school-related goals. The support worker meets with the student to identify strategies and resources that are necessary for the student to succeed in an academic setting. This service is helpful for students who lack motivation, and it can be used to strengthen executive functioning skills to work towards excelling in their academic setting independently. It also can be utilized to support students with organization, specific educational tutoring and identifying accommodations needed for diagnoses, including but not limited to, attention deficit disorder (ADD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). With this service, parents can also benefit from assistance navigating their child’s educational or behavioral needs regarding individualized plans such as an IEP or 504 plan.
Academic support can also be a resource for families of students with CHINS petitions regarding truancy issues. Truancy is typically indicative of inadequate parental support, lack of structure in the home, or other unidentified needs of the student. Academic Support services focus on the root of truancy, household dysfunction, and school struggles while identifying accommodations for the home and school that will best support the success of the student.
Clinical Behavioral Support
A trauma-informed program designed to provide clinical support to children struggling with behavioral support in the home to prevent out-of-home placement.
This program provides two master’s level clinicians per family to support the behavioral and relational needs of the client. CBS will focus on assessing and identifying the family's needs, providing a diagnosis when appropriate, and identifying modalities that would be effective for each individual client.
All clinicians in the home will have training in CBT, DBT, attachment-based family support, and trauma-informed psychoeducation. Clinicians will be paired with the client based on their knowledge of modalities that best serve the family. CBS is home-based and is intended to be a short-term service.
