Service Level: Engaging Families as Partners in Decision-Making

Description of Family Engagement at the Service Level

Family engagement is essential in promoting positive child and youth outcomes in education, mental health, health, child welfare, and juvenile justice. These key child and youth serving systems are incorporating practices, policies and processes within their agencies to strengthen and implement meaningful family engagement at the service level. Increasingly, staffs are collaborating with family members in planning and decision-making regarding their children’s and youth’s needs, services, plans, and goals. Child and youth serving agencies are creating distinct family engagement approaches that align with their agency’s mission, goals, and performance and outcome measures. Each child serving system has focused their family engagement efforts on important service areas as reflected in the following diagram:

Family Engagement Focuses on Key Service Areas

Education — Meaningful family engagement in schools means that families and educators work in partnership to support all students in academics, social emotional learning and development and ultimately educational success, using research-based practices and supports in schools, classrooms, and at home.¹

Child Welfare — Caseworkers engage families in individualized planning and goal setting related to safety, permanency and well-being for every young person and family receiving child protective services.² Each family is to be respected and recognized as having expertise about their own family and need to be actively involved in making decisions for the young person.³

Juvenile Justice — Parents and families are actively engaged in the rehabilitation of juvenile justice-involved youth by serving in key roles as recipients, direct supports, extenders, or managers of services.⁴ Justice system providers are highly motivated and actively work to routinely integrate parent and family engagement within their system.

Mental Health — A family-driven care approach guides youth mental health providers including child psychiatrists, on how to effectively engage families in their child’s care.⁵ Family-driven care means family members have a primary role in decision-making and co-designing their child’s comprehensive service plan and treatment goals, including the selection of culturally and linguistically competent supports.⁶

Primary Health — Patient- and family-centered care is an approach to the planning, delivery, and evaluation of health care that calls for collaboration and partnerships among health care providers, patients, and families. In patient- and family-centered care, patients and families define their “family” and determine how they will participate in care and decision-making.⁷

Commonalities in Family Engagement Principles and Practices Across Service Systems

Child and youth service systems share commonalities in their family engagement principles and practices such as shared decision-making, collaboration, partnership, two-way communication, meaningful roles, mutual respect and acknowledgement of family expertise.⁸ These systems have articulated guiding principles that reflect the organization’s beliefs about why and how they will bring about family engagement.

Guiding principles are most effective when staff and families are involved in developing and regularly revisiting the philosophy that will guide how they operate. Meaningful family engagement also means that families can serve in various roles that contribute to their child’s progress and success in achieving personal goals.

Roles performed by families may include serving as a:

• collaborator in service planning,
• encourager,
• overseer of services,
• monitor,
• participant in services,
• parent peer support provider,
• advocate,
• decision-maker,
• cultural broker,
• learner, and
• trainer of families and staff to name a few of many roles that families can perform in support of their children.

Address Staff Readiness for Family Engagement

Although the impact and benefits are clear, implementing family engagement is not clear-cut. Family and staff partnership is most successful when both staff and families are prepared to communicate and collaborate. A lack of communication with and support for families is associated with lower levels of family engagement.⁹ Professional development on family engagement can help prepare staff and families on how to partner and collaborate. However, each staff and family must work at building trusting relationships as a foundation to engage in difficult conversations about needed change.

Some agencies encourage self-assessments to gauge agency and staff attitudes, beliefs, and readiness to work with families as equal partners. Some agencies also include family engagement metrics or indicators in staff/administrator evaluation and performance systems.¹⁰ Family engagement becomes an essential component of any collective impact strategy as human service sectors work to create a culture of shared responsibility for improving outcomes for all youth. Engaging families in our communities requires a shared effort with leadership, educators, providers and community members committing to engage families in purposeful ways to help them support their children’s development.¹¹

Resources

Education (K-12)

Mental Health

Child Welfare

Primary Health

Juvenile Justice

References