What Permanency Means for the Young Parents and Independent Living Residents We Support
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: achieving permanency is our top priority for every person we work with. But what does achieving permanency actually look like? There could be as many answers to that question as there are people who need help from agencies like CFCS. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy question to explore. In that spirit, we’re starting a series on the blog called “What Permanency Means…”, where we’ll explore what permanency means for the many different people we serve. Today, we’re looking at what permanency means for the young parents we work with in our Young Parents Support program (YPS) and the young people in our Independent Living program, which are both part of our Family Support & Stabilization program.
The people we serve in YPS are pregnant and/or parenting young adults under the age of 23 living in Boston. We work with young parents who are single, married and co-parenting. Many of the young parents we work with in this program are mothers, but we also work with fathers.
We work frequently with young parents who are 16, 17 or 18 years old. Some clients are also involved with the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in some capacity when they come to us. Since they’re involved with DCF, they already receive some support from the state and have a state social worker. This allows us to build a partnership so that means there’s one more person on their team.
The people we serve in Independent Living (IL) are ages 18 to 21, and are transitioning out of the child welfare system and becoming prepared to live independently. We support them as they pursue their education, find a job, strengthen their relationships with family and friends who can be there for them after they leave our IL program and build their social-emotional skills and awareness.
Permanency for our YPS and IL clients means, seeking out and strengthening supports for both themselves and their children, so that when CFCS is no longer working with them they know who they can reach out to for help when they need it. We want our YPS and IL clients to have someone in their lives who can support them through an emotional crisis, a financial emergency or when they’re just overwhelmed and need a babysitter or someone to vent with. Many of the young parents we work with don’t have stable housing situations, so a lot of our work with them is to build an emergency plan so they have someone they’ll be able to stay with if needed.
However, permanency for YPS and IL clients is not as simple as making a few calls and setting up a contingency plan. In our practice, achieving permanency actually begins with the individual. A lot of our work begins with helping our clients to develop their self-awareness, sense of self-worth, interpersonal skills and social-emotional skills, so they become better prepared and willing to engage in relationships. Many of the young people we work with have experienced abuse and neglect, and due to that trauma, they don’t really trust people. It’s our job to help them re-establish their self-confidence.
We use many tools to support our clients in building up their self-confidence and emotional strength. From gratitude journals to curriculum such as the I Am Why project and Power Source Parenting, we use many evidence-based practices to help our clients reflect on and work through their relationships, get them comfortable with setting boundaries, show them ways they can practice self-care and most of all, support their sense of self-worth.
“Permanency is not as simple as making a few calls and setting up a contingency plan. In our practice, achieving permanency begins with the individual.”
We also work with our clients to help them establish appropriate, manageable goals, and we celebrate each milestone as they progress. A big part of supporting them in achieving their goals is to get them more connected to the community. We connect them to their local community centers and free workshops, and we invite them to peer activities whenever possible. Our residents in IL are also welcome to go to the life skills presentations we host at the group homes, and to receive individual life skills trainings from their CFCS case manager.
This first part is a huge part of our approach. This part is all about helping our young parents become prepared to do the work of establishing and strengthening relationships with their families. It wouldn’t be right to just plunge someone into connecting with a family member they have a complicated relationship with if they’re not emotionally ready for it, or if they haven’t practiced setting appropriate boundaries. At CFCS, we work to prepare our clients so they have the tools to engage in this process.
That’s step one of our work with YPS and IL clients. The second step is partnering with the clients to identify who’s important to them, who they miss, who they love and what family looks like for them. In helping them to re-engage and strengthen those relationships, we also reach out to bridge communication gaps and bring those people back into their circle.
This second part is where many challenges crop up in our work. Sometimes, our clients don’t want to re-engage with their family, or they don’t want CFCS to reach out to them. So we dig into why our clients feel this way, and help them feel prepared to initiate this process.
This takes time and an incredible amount of persistence. But when we can work through it and prepare the client to start the process of re-connecting and strengthening these family relationships in earnest, we often see really wonderful things start to happen for them.
We want to help our clients feel less isolated and to reconnect them with members of their family and community because we know that these relationships can be true sources of support and love throughout their lives. We saw a great example of this recently when a young mother’s child was removed abruptly from her care.
The young mother, who we’ll call Anna, is a YPS client working with our YPS program coordinator Karmen. When her child was removed from her home, Anna immediately reached out to Karmen for help. Karmen knew that Anna sometimes lived with her mother, but the two of them had trouble communicating. Karmen reached out to Anna’s mother and one of Anna’s aunts with whom she is close, and the four of them worked together to get the child back. Together, they were able to successfully reunite Anna with her child in a matter of days.
This situation showed us how important it is for our clients to have stable-enough relationships in their lives to help them navigate these issues. Anna reached out to Karmen because she didn’t feel like she could reach out to anyone else. Karmen is now working with both of them so that next time, Anna will feel like she can depend on her family members for help in a crisis.
For us, the bottom line is that every day, we see our residents in IL and our YPS clients bearing the weight of the world, when they should have a family by their side to bear that weight with them. That’s what a family is for: to celebrate your successes, to hear about your bad day, to get you through a crisis. This work, that should be done by a family, is being done by our clients by themselves. When we can connect them with friends and family who can help take that weight off their shoulders, that’s the best part of our job.
We’ve accomplished a lot in YPS and IL so far, but our YPS program isn’t even two years old yet. Our practices are still evolving, and we stay up-to-date with the latest research so we can provide our clients with support that is respectful, trauma-informed and effective. We are very proud of all the clients we’ve worked with in YPS and IL, and we hope to expand the program soon so we can serve even more young people living in the Greater Boston area.
If you or someone you know might be interested in working with our YPS program, visit our YPS page on our website to submit an inquiry or referral form today!