Therapeutic Foster Care

Every community has a foster care system to care for children and adolescents who are unable to reside with their biological family for a variety of reasons including death, incapacitation or incarceration of the biological parents, or abuse and neglect on the part of the child's primary caregivers. While many children do quite well in community foster care settings, a minority of foster children bear additional burdens of complex emotional, behavioral or medical problems which can easily overwhelm a typical foster family. Therapeutic Foster Care provides comprehensive training and case management services to recruit, train and support foster parents to successfully take on the most demanding foster children who would otherwise be moved from home to home or institutionalized.

Advantages of Therapeutic Foster Care:

• Foster parents receive extensive training and support in dealing with complex emotional, behavioral or medical needs of children
• Ongoing in-home support is provided by trained case managers
• Children who would otherwise be institutionalized are able to reside in single family setting
• Counties receive support in recruiting qualified foster parents with skills that exceed regular foster parenting requirements
• Foster kids attend local schools
• Intensive support is available during periods of crisis or conflict that would otherwise overwhelm foster parents
• Services are coordinated with local community providers and agencies
• Coordinated efforts are made to achieve family re-unification, whenever possible