Foster Care Training

Sponsored by Children’s Hospital, Oakland
Online via Zoom: Login info will be emailed

Providers serving systems-involved infants, children and families are in a quandary. The ethical mandate to uphold racial justice often seems antithetical to working in systems that target disenfranchised families. Current consensus holds that infants and young children must be treated not in isolation, but in the context of their relationships with caregivers, yet insurance systems including Medi-Cal require that an individual, not a relationship be identified as subscriber. Best practice demands that assessment and intervention be strengths-based, but service eligibility criteria often push toward a focus on deficits. And the wisdom from attachment, development, and clinical fields emphasizes the complex, dynamic nature of relationships and psychological development, but providers are often required to document their work in exclusively behavioral terms.

The Parent–Child Relationship Competency (PCRC) framework offers a solution. The PCRCs are a set of capacities that emerge spontaneously under ordinary circumstances in parent–child relationships to support child development and family well-being, but which may be strained, impaired, or absent when something is wrong. PCRC-focused clinical assessment offers a clear path to culturally attuned, relationship-based case formulation, treatment planning, documentation, and billing that readily conforms with the requirements of systems of care organized around an individual identified client.

This six-hour course will include an introduction to the Parent-Child Relationship Competencies (PCRC) framework and opportunities to apply it in work with children and families. There will be a special focus on child welfare-involved families, yet the course will be relevant for any providers interested in deepening awareness of the influential, bi-directional dynamics of parent-child relationships – both present-day, and family-of-origin – and in learning to operationalize a social justice approach.

Register Here