I first learned about Family Preservation Services in the early 1980’s while I was at the Child Welfare League of America working on projects focused on Adoption and Permanency Planning. I was elated and skeptical at the same time. I cheered at the immediate (within 24 hours) response to referrals, concern for the child’s safety and the focus on the family as a unit and their relationship to the community and that the services would be given in that home and community. It made so much sense for the worker to be there day and night. And yes, how could they do this if they didn’t have a caseload of two. How great it would be to have an in depth evaluation by skilled staff who had seen first-hand how the family functions. Wouldn’t this satisfy all the courts that wanted more? But I didn’t know how much you could really accomplish with our families in two months. These were the kinds of families we had seen for years of continuous non-service. Could episodic help really help? Did families get referred on?

I spent the first fifteen years of my career as a social worker, supervisor and administrator in a public child welfare agency in New Jersey. With a liberal arts bachelor’s degree and one year of law school, I wanted to be an advocate for children and their families because I had worked with poor children in my college summers and knew they needed help.

I quickly learned, as a beginning caseworker in 1961 with a foster care caseload of 50 kids, I wasn’t able to give them much help. I rarely saw their birth families and wouldn’t have known what to do with or for them if I had. By agency standards, I was doing a good job if the kids were safe and the foster parents had no complaints. But the situation was troubling to me and to the other workers. It seemed we and the children were running in place. The records didn’t really say clearly why the children were placed except that the parents had been neglectful or abusive and needed to improve their parenting and household management skills. When asked by the foster parents what the plan was for their children we had the boiler plate phrase—”the child would continue in care”.

Within two years, I was promoted to “Intake” worker—the person who went out after the initial complaint of abuse or neglect, evaluated the situation, decided whether we would take the case and made recommendations for service. If I had four hours combined interview time with the parents that was a lot.

Soon after getting my Master’s degree in Social work I became a supervisor of five caseworkers and an adoption worker. I saw my own experience replicated in those of my workers. I also became aware that we were all having difficulty getting a court to terminate parental rights and free children for adoption because we did not really know the parents and hadn’t worked intensively enough with them on their problems. High worker turnover, inexperienced and untrained staff and lack of a mandate to do this work were all contributing factors. In the late 60’s and early 70’s our agency had 50,000 children in foster care and the number was growing. By then I was Chief of Foster Care and Adoption Resources. Our function was to find families for our children. Our mission to get permanent families for our kids heightened our contacts with their birth families. The experience was eye opening and upsetting. We found birth parents and family members who were willing and able to take their children from foster care. We found parents, whose rights could have been terminated years ago, sparing their children numerous moves in foster care and emotional upset. These children could have found their permanent family when they were very young. Intensive and skilled services to their parents were at the top of a very long list of the things we should have being doing for our children and were not.

I retired in 1996. Long before that I had become a convert to intensive family preservation services. My doubts had been erased. It did what it promised. Families and children were helped How rare and wonderful is that for a social service?

No small credit for that goes to the Behavioral Science Institute’ founders and the current leadership of the Institute for Family Development: David Haapala, Jill Kinney, Charlotte Booth and Shelley Leavitt. I have a great deal of affection and admiration for you. You are the people whose vision, intelligence and passion have made all this possible. Your respect for your clients and their capacities infect your staff and the thousands you have trained. Your values are caught not taught.

Anyone who has ever done cutting edge work knows that it takes courage. You face your own doubts and some very hostile critics. I praise you for your strength. In the end, I suspect that strength comes from the knowledge that you are “Doing the right thing”. And doing it not for you but for others.

I wish you God speed.

Betsy Cole

Posted by Peg Marckworth