Innovative Birth to Six Focused Services

For my Department it was never a matter of prioritizing our services to our children 0-6 in the child welfare system but reallocating our resources and our practices to better understand the needs of this vulnerable population. As we began to understand that each of our 0-6ers who came into foster care needed special care, we initiated discussions with the experts (infant mental health, public health nurses, child development experts, foster care providers, the court, CASA, early education experts, etc.) about how we might assess the needs of these very young children within the framework of the child welfare system. We were very fortunate how easy bringing these experts to the table were and how supportive they all were in partnering with us to better support our 0-6 children.

Our Fresno County First Five Commission contracted with a consultant to help construct what would later be called, the "Child Focus Team." Since January 2009, the team has consistently ensured that each 0-6 year old is assessed along the medical, developmental, educational, social/emotional and family connections continuum. This team is made up of a child welfare supervisor; social work practitioner and social work permanency specialist; social work practitioner educational liaison specializing in pre-school education; a public health nurse and a home visitor. The home visitor visits the care provider and the child within days of placement and evaluates the placement. Our home visitor is a 30+ year experienced foster parent who has fostered over 50 special needs infants and has adopted five special needs children.

Our Fresno State Foster Parent Training Academy has worked with us to begin to examine the model for training and supporting foster parents, specifically those who predominantly provided care for children aged 0-6. Last Fall, we implemented a pilot training/support group for about 12 foster parents and social workers. The group is facilitated by an Academy trainer/foster parent and a second foster parent. A Children's Hospital RN attends each meeting, as do some of our birth parent partners. The curriculum deals with early childhood attachment, trauma's impact on development and attachment, and many of the medical issues for infants as a result of abuse and neglect. The parent partners provide the foster parents and the social workers insight and coaching around working with their foster child's parents. The pilot group will conclude this month, and we have very high hopes that the foster parents who have gone through the pilot process will want to, themselves, facilitate a very similar group. In this way, we will continue to spread the implementation of this training/support model throughout both our county foster parent constituency as well as throughout our Foster Family Agency (FFA) providers.

We are asking now that our foster parents (including our FFA parents) supervise the majority of the visits between their children and their birth parents because we know that the foster parent, to a 3 week old child who has been in foster care since he/she was born, is the parent of the child (from the child's perspective). Not separating the child from the foster parent when the child visits the parent will reduce the potential for trauma and anxiety for the pre-verbal child.

This work is just beginning but we know it is the right direction and we are excited about this work and our ongoing partnerships with our child development experts, our community organizations, our educational institutions and our foundation supporters. As we pursue this work I ask my staff to ask one question of themselves and that is; "Is the decisions we are making for this child the same one we would want for our own child?" The answer must be yes or we start over. It is as simple as that.