Exploring Challenges and Facilitators to Reunification for Homeless Families

Background and Purpose: Housing-unstable families involved with child welfare face multiple challenges to successful reunification. Housing instability can hinder caregivers’ abilities to complete case plan goals in a timely manner, which can extend the time to reunification or prevent it altogether. Thus, children from housing unstable families spend considerably more time in foster care as compared to children in stably housed families. Partnering for Family Success (PFS), a randomized control trial project in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, provided housing assistance and intensive case management to quickly house housing-unstable parents and safely reunify them with their children. The purpose of this study was to examine clients’ and staff members’ experiences with the project and explore the factors that were barriers and facilitators of reunification as well as reasons children in the project returned to foster care.

Methods: To achieve the research goals, we conducted qualitative interviews with clients and the key project and child welfare staff with whom they worked. We were interested in exploring shared and unshared perceptions of reality among clients, their case manager and their child welfare workers and therefore used a social constructionist framework. Purposeful stratified random sampling was employed to select the sample. A list of treatment group clients was generated according to whether the case had recidivated or reunified. Recidivation was defined by reunification occurring and then the child returning to foster care. Sixteen in-person client interviews were conducted. Once client interviews were complete, we contacted the clients’ project case workers and therapists (n=5) and child welfare caseworkers (n=15), who could discuss their clients’ cases. Interviews asked about perceptions of the reasons for the child’s initial removal, how the case progressed, what factors supported clients’ progress, and in recidivated cases, what factors were responsible for recidivism or reunification. Staff also shared their experiences working with project workers and impressions of the program.

Findings: Nearly all interviewed clients and child welfare workers credited project caseworkers and therapists for providing extensive social support and advocacy for clients in navigating the welfare and the court system. Providing instrumental and material support and helping clients develop life skills were identified as key facilitators for reunification. In terms of recidivism, domestic violence was identified as an important factor in recidivated cases. Drug abuse relapse and mental health issues were also identified as factors related to recidivism. In addition to individual challenges, larger structural system issues were also recognized as playing roles in client recidivism. In particular, child welfare workers’ bias, intractability, and unwillingness to recognize client progress was one factor, and a lack of compassion among system actors (including guardians ad litem, magistrates, etc.) was another.

Implications: Housing provides a platform for stabilization, but it appears to be insufficient for stimulating reunification. Low-income families continue to experience a variety of adversities, including not limited to concentrated disadvantage and community violence, which may add to existing mental health, substance abuse and domestic violence issues. Families involved in multiple systems involved need extensive and long-term support to ensure their stability.