What is the Family-Centered Approach?
1) 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 children's safety and needs within the context of their families and communities and builds on families' strengths to achieve optimal outcomes. Families are defined broadly to include birth, blended, kinship, and foster and adoptive families.
2) It's when parents and teachers work together. Example- makes it easier for a child to develop and learn.
3) Family-centered services are based upon the belief that the best place for children to grow up is in a family and the most effective way to ensure children's safety, permanency, and well-being is to provide services that engage, involve, strengthen, and support families.
4) 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 by focusing on solutions, Engaging, empowering, and partnering with families throughout the decision- and goal-making processes, Developing a relationship between parents and service providers characterized by mutual trust, respect, honesty, and open communication, 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