What is Therapeutic Foster Parenting?
Compass Health’s therapeutic foster care program serves children with behavioral health challenges, often resulting from abuse and/or neglect. Foster Parents positively impact a child’s life by providing a safe, loving, temporary home. Fostering a child makes it possible for them to stay connected to their family, community, and other supportive adults. Therapeutic Foster Parents receive additional training and are an integrated part of our clinical team working to care for the youth. Our foster parents receive additional compensation to manage the increased needs of youth placed in their home.
Who does Therapeutic Foster Parenting serve?
Compass Health’s therapeutic foster care program serves children ages 6-17 with behavioral health challenges, often resulting from abuse and/or neglect. Youth are currently enrolled in the child welfare system and need additional services/support beyond a traditional foster care placement. There is a need for both short-term and long-term caregivers.
Approach to care
Foster parents receive extensive training and support from a team of Compass Health professionals. An individualized care plan is developed to address the full spectrum of the child’s needs and implemented in a team approach. Our foster parents are essential team members who provide stability, understanding, and care for the child.
Foster care is a system of support for families. As a foster parent, you are part of this support network and can make a difference in the lives of a child’s parents, too. We believe youth in our care thrive when we all work together to support them.
Goal of Therapeutic Foster Parenting
The number one protective factor for a young person is having at least one supportive adult in their life. While working to help a child feel cared for, heard, and valued, fostering a child also works to stabilize youth and prepare them for permanency with their family or another long-term resource.
For many, the relationships they develop with children placed in their homes and their families extend well beyond the time the placement ends.