Preventing foster care entry at the community, systems, and societal levels: Recommendations from the child-serving workforce

Child welfare policy and practice in the United States is increasingly concerned with the prevention of child maltreatment and foster care entry. Expanding prevention capacity through new programs and supports will require the buy-in of the current child-serving workforce both in child welfare systems as well as other settings such as mental health, schools, and early childhood services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify a set of recommendations for preventing foster care entry from members of the child-serving workforce to gauge their alignment with current strategies and to better understand workers’ priorities for reforming our current approach to promoting child and family wellbeing. Data were collected via interview, focus groups, and open-ended survey questions from a total of 614 participants working in child-serving settings. Through theoretical thematic analysis, we identified a set of 14 recommendations for preventing foster care entry across the community, systems, and societal levels. Broadly, recommendations focused on promoting community connectedness, adopting a public health approach to child maltreatment prevention, shifting child welfare practice to be more proactive in providing resources to families, enhancing cross-systems collaboration, and passing a range of policies to enhance family and child wellbeing with a particular emphasis on income supports. Findings from the study suggest that the current child-serving workforce is strongly committed to the national shift toward maltreatment prevention, and that they endorse strengths-based, data-informed strategies for achieving this objective.