Family Support
Family Support Programs are community-based services that help to promote the well-being of children and families as well as increase the strength and stability of families. The services can be for youth and/or parents, and can occur within the home or at community locations. There are 4 sub-types of family support programs: Parenting Class, Advocacy, Social Workers, and Family Support.
Parenting classes are a chance for parents to actively acquire parenting skills through sessions that focus on improving parenting of and communication with their children. Parents are taught how to engage in skill building, problem solving, and how to model types of mechanisms in an effort to reduce adverse childhood outcomes.
Advocacy Programs help guide youth and/or their families through the juvenile justice system, explaining the process and importance of each hearing, outcome, or decision. Advocates may meet with youth and families at their home prior to court appearances to discuss the purpose of the hearing or what the consequences of not appearing in court may be. Advocates can also accompany youth and families to the proceedings.
Social Workers assist youth with increasing their capacity for problem solving and coping, and help them obtain needed resources as well as facilitate interactions between youth and their environment. They seek to improve the youth’s quality of wellbeing through research directed therapeutic methods.
The sub-type for Family Support covers the programs that are in the community helping families with a variety of needs that may not fit into the other 3 categories. Family Support workers can help families work out communication issues, resolve school attendance problems, locate resources within the community to help the families meet the needs of all family members, or many other services that can be individualized for the youth and/or family’s needs.
Recordings
Adding assessment types to Family Support Screens
This video reviews the steps to select assessment tools being used by individual programs to be populated into the scores tab on the Family Support screens in the JCMS. This process is the same for diversion, mental health, and assessment programs, but is a new feature to the Family Support screens.
Family Support Presenting Issue field added
This video looks at the addition of the Presenting Issue field to the Family Support intake screens in the JCMS. As we see an increase in family support programs being utilized prior to court involvement, programs have asked for a place to track why they are receiving referrals.
This short video looks at the new tab on the family support screens that will allow programs to enter and track referrals made to other programs and/or services for the youth and their family.
This video reviews the steps to adding contacts, classes, and scores in the family support screens in the JCMS under the tabs under the same name.
Update July 2018 - contacts tab
This video reviews the contact tab in the Family Support screens in the JCMS after an update to the screens was completed in July 2018. This update created a begin date and end date field for capturing contact with youth and families to allow for programs to aggregate contact information rather than entering each individual contact.
Resources
Data on Child Abuse and Neglect or Foster Care Services
Parenting