Reunification Starts From Day One: Rethinking How We Support Families

September is Family Reunification Month, and providers are taking this time to recognize the importance of safely reunifying children with their families and to consider how social service professionals can better support families through the process.

This week, we brought together providers from Texas and across the country for a conversation about family reunification. Panelists shared practical strategies and a challenge to reconsider how we approach parents whose children enter foster care.

As Tracie Jackson of Saint Francis Ministries put it simply: “Reunification starts from day one.”

She and others agreed that reunification efforts cannot start months into a case. It starts with the first conversations with a family and continues through every interaction.

Helping Families Succeed

One approach discussed during the panel was the use of parent support workers, who help parents identify and address barriers to reunification.

Sometimes those barriers are directly connected to the circumstances that brought the family into care, such as connecting a parent with addiction treatment. At other times, the support may be much more practical, such as helping a parent develop routines, maintain a safe and clean home, or navigate the systems and resources they need to stabilize their family.

The goal is not simply to tell parents what they need to change, but to walk alongside them.

“We have to be in the business of helping birth families succeed,” said Atasha Kelley-Harris of Family Roots for Life.

Compassion and Accountability Can Coexist

Panelists also challenged one of the most persistent assumptions in child welfare: that the circumstances that brought a family into care tell us the whole story.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that what brought the family into care tells us all we need to know about those parents,” Tracie Jackson said.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t hold parents accountable, it means we enter in with compassion,” she added.

Atasha Kelley-Harris added that we need “a sense of forgiveness and a sense of hope with the families.”

That hope matters. Families are more than the worst moment that brought them to the attention of the system. Effective reunification work recognizes that people can change, families can heal, and circumstances can improve when parents have meaningful support.

Rethinking What “Best” Means

Audria Choudhury from Miracle Foundation works with both families in the US and in India. She challenged another deeply rooted assumption: our definition of what is “best” for a child.

“We have to work toward undoing the bias of what we consider as ‘best’ for a child,” she said.

As the panel discussed, just because we have better resources, it doesn’t mean we are a better fit or deserve our children more than others who do not. And no placement decision should minimize the importance of a child’s connection to their family. Even when a child cannot immediately return home, maintaining and strengthening those connections can have lasting benefits.

What Can We Learn From Other Communities?

The panel also highlighted promising approaches from outside Texas.

Justin Lee from Casey Family Programs is based in Los Angeles County. He shared how the county has safely reduced the number of children in care while focusing on permanency within 12 months. Strategies include liberalizing family time, strengthening internal staffing around protective factors, and engaging parents early.

Los Angeles County also uses Parents in Partnership, which connects parents who have successfully navigated the child welfare system with families currently involved in it. Parent partners provide support, information, mentorship, and advocacy.

Chrissy Triplett shared the Success Coach Service Model the Catawba County Government uses in North Carolina. It is a voluntary approach that supports families across the permanency spectrum. She’s learned that relationship-building is central to family support.

“Hiring people who can genuinely engage with families is really important,” Chrissy Triplett said.

North Carolina’s Success Coach model has since expanded statewide, providing voluntary, family-focused support after permanency and helping families address practical challenges that can threaten long-term stability.

Casey Family Programs has also identified strategies that can help safely reduce time in foster care, emphasizing that agencies need the structures, supervision and tools to prioritize reunification from day one.