That Wall is Around My Heart: Family Centered Practice

The author uses a clinical case study, in which he works with a teenager and his adoptive parents to illustrate how placement and adoption decisions can provide physical safety while at the same time exacerbating and extending overlooked and destructive effects of child abuse. The case study highlights the continuing impact of childhood trauma on the interpersonal patterns of behavior within the family, whether biological, kinship, foster or adoptive. The tendency for patterns of aggression and reactivity to be repeated by the victim and his or her caregivers in a foster or adoptive home, and then to extend into the next generation, is an integral aspect of the cycle of child abuse and underscores a critical challenge for skilled and patient staff in family-based service programs.

The Family Partners Credit Card: A Token Economy System Adapted for Intensive Family Preservation Services to Enable Families to Manage Difficult Behavior of Adolescents

Increasingly, families referred for Intensive Family Preservation Services have not experienced a crisis of maltreatment, focused on the parent; rather these families have children with chronic behavioral difficulties for which their parents lack the skills to cope. These are the same families whose children were formerly placed in residential programs. This paper presents The Family Partners Credit Card System, incorporating behavioral techniques developed to treat children in out-of-home placements into a family preservation model. Two case examples illustrate how the system has been modified to train biological or adoptive parents in parenting skills, enable them to teach their children pro-family behaviors, and reinforce new behaviors through a credit card that monitors an ongoing balance of credits and fines.