In-Home Counseling Helps to Salvage Families : Mental health: The program seeks to avoid placing children in foster care. Instead it tries to work with parents and youngsters by keeping them united.

Tim and Kim Quisenberry believe that without help from an unusual program offering in-home counseling for troubled children and their parents, their family could not have been salvaged.

“We would have gotten through the court system and gotten the kids back, but I don’t think we could have lasted much after that,” Tim Quisenberry said.

Recovering drug addicts, the Quisenberrys were separated from their three children for half a year by juvenile authorities. Their family is among the most recent graduates of the In-Home Family Treatment program of the nonprofit Judson Center in suburban Detroit.

The 5-year-old program is a radical departure from the traditional path of placing children in foster care.

Judson Center director Mounir Sharobeem said social workers dealing with child abuse and neglect often have tended to feel that “the family is the cause of the problem.

“We look at it as part of the solution,” he said. “Nobody loves children more than the family, (but) sometimes they don’t know how to express it.”

Quisenberry, 29, and his 25-year-old wife say the center helped them get their lives in order, open lines of communication and establish reasonable discipline when their family was reunited last year.

Having the family divided “tears us up and tears the kids up. Their little minds just don’t understand,” he said.

Routinely placing troubled children in foster care simply has not worked, said Bobette Schrandt, director of the in-home program.

Schrandt said foster care offers no sense of permanency to children, who often are shuttled around among several different homes. Foster-care children often develop antisocial attitudes, and fewer than 75% of them are successfully reunited with their families, compared to 98% reported nationally for in-home programs, she said.

Nationally, an estimated 500,000 youngsters currently are in some form of care outside their home, Schrandt said. No figures are available for in-home treatment.

The National Resource Center on Family-based Care, based in Iowa, lists more than 300 organizations that provide some form of in-home counseling or crisis intervention services. In-home programs are operating in half the states, according to the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington.

The in-home approach “allows us to work within the home environment where the problem started,” Schrandt said.

“We find families relate to us better,” she said. “It’s their territory. We also become a part of that family structure. We learn a lot more family secrets than a lot of other therapists, because we’re in the home.”

Schrandt says the program has a success rate of between 85% and 95% and, at a cost of $39 per day, is about a third as expensive as institutional programs.

Judson’s program handles about 75 cases referred by county courts and social service departments and by the state’s Fairlawn Center for severely emotionally disturbed children in Pontiac.

“We deal with a wide range of different kinds of situations and behaviors and dysfunctions, a wide range of socioeconomic levels,” Schrandt said.

A primary therapist and a family counselor are assigned to each family. In a minimum of three visits per week, generally over a six-month period, they provide services including family therapy, marital therapy and sibling group therapy.

Workers stress “parenting skills, child management, helping them with discipline,” Schrandt said.

“A lot of parents don’t understand where abuse and neglect comes from. Many of them only do the things they know because that is how they were treated.”

In many cases, she says, basic instruction in child development also is helpful. The program also includes a 24-hour emergency service.

“If a parent (has a) baby crying and it won’t stop, is frustrated because she doesn’t know what to do, might feel herself on the verge of wanting to hit the baby, we can go to her,” Schrandt said.

Judson workers also help with budgeting, education and career counseling, and provide immediate needs.

“If a family is in need of bed or food or clothing, it’s difficult to talk about discipline or management-type issues,” Schrandt said. “We meet basic needs and help them get on to other issues.”

The program even deals with the lighter side of life, because many troubled families “don’t know how to have fun,” Schrandt said. Leisure and recreational planning help family members “learn to enjoy each other.”

Although the aim is to keep the family together, the center does not consider removing a child a total failure.

“The child doesn’t have to linger in the (foster care) system,” Schrandt said. “We can go to the courts and say this child should be removed from the family” and placed for immediate adoption.