Effective Part C Early Intervention Services for Child Welfare-Involved Children and Families

Background and Purpose: The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) requires child welfare programs to refer all children age birth to three with substantiated cases of abuse and neglect to Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Early Intervention providers for developmental assessment and services. Little is known about early intervention professional practices with child welfare-involved children and families. There is some research that explores collaboration between child welfare and early intervention system.

This purpose of this qualitative study was to identify effective early intervention practices for working with child welfare-involved children and families. The objectives of the study were to a) explore early intervention professional’s successes and challenges working with this population, b) to identify best practices, and c) to make recommendations for changes in policy and practice.

Methods: The study used an emergent constructivist design utilizing semi-structured interviews with 22 early intervention professionals in four states. Purposeful sampling was used to select initial participants and nominational sampling for subsequent participants were used. Participants were recruited via email and telephone. The sample was 100% female; included professionals from non-profit (n=10) and state programs (n=11); and included 3 early childhood educators, 5 occupational therapists, 3 physical therapist, 1 psychologist, 6 speech language pathologists, and 4 social workers. Interviews were conducted via ZOOM meeting and focused on the lived practice experiences of early intervention professionals. Verbatim transcripts were created using the Live transcript feature of ZOOM and analyzed using a grounded theory process to deconstruct (unitize) an reconstruct to create themes using Atlas.ti qualitative software.

Results: Data analysis revealed challenges for early intervention professional’s successful engagement and intervention with child welfare-involved children and families. General themes include a) challenges with information sharing across systems, b) conflicting goals between systems, c) difficulty engaging families, d) worker safety, e) absence of skills needed to support families with complex needs, and f) gaps in early intervention and child welfare policy. Analysis also revealed state-specific issues related to referral and collaboration processes and the need for a stronger social work presence.

Conclusions and implications: Implications from this study highlight early intervention professional’s challenges with working with this population, their knowledge of the impact of abuse and neglect on infants and toddlers, and effective early intervention practices. Implications for practice include a) the need to increase awareness of the needs of these children and families, b) the need to define early intervention competencies and provide training, and c) improve effectiveness of collaboration between systems. A policy implication is to improve language and processes in CAPTA and IDEA that strengthen the commitment to connecting children age zero to three to Part C early intervention services and help families to keep their children at home safely, stabilize child welfare placements, and improve developmental outcomes.