Helping Families Stay Together

At a time of year when so much emphasis is placed on family, there are a half-million children in the United States who are separated from their parents, and one in five of them are in California. The number of children living in some sort of foster care--foster homes, mental health and detention facilities--mushroomed by 44% in California during 1985-88. The national total is expected to climb to 840,000 in five years, according to a report by the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. Despite this monstrous trend, there are some immediate steps that can be taken to quell this troubling increase, and Ventura County is leading the way in California.

Ventura County stands as the model of a system whose main goal is to preserve the family unit by intervening early in crises. By using psychiatric social workers, counselors, educators, corrections and probation workers, county officials have set up a system to help families work through the myriad problems that tear families apart.

If necessary, such as in cases of violence, the child can be placed with foster parents or in a group home. But child services cases do not always involve an abusive parent and a terrorized child: Sometimes a child is absent from school or runs afoul of the law because, for example, father is absent and mother is depressed and does not know how to handle the meager family finances. In response, Ventura County would typically call upon its network of social service professionals to help the child and mother through a difficult period, working together in the home. One way to measure the impressive results: As of 1987, welfare placement costs declined in Ventura County, with an annual savings of $226,000 that offset 16% of the project costs.

No one suggests that Ventura County’s approach to child welfare is a panacea for the underlying societal ills that have caused the deterioration of the American family. But the county is proving the value of the proverbial ounce of prevention.