A Clinical Model for Parenting Juvenile Offenders: A Comparison of Group Care Versus Family Care

Abstract

Treatment foster care, an intervention model that offers an alternative to group residential care for serious chronic juvenile offenders is described along with results of a study comparing outcomes for boys who participated in treatment foster care (TFC) and group care (GC) placements. The TFC approach is an extension of the parent-mediated treatments that have previously been shown to be effective in working with children with aggression and antisocial behavior problems. In TFC, community families were recruited and trained to provide placements for study boys. One boy was placed per home. GC boys were placed with 6-15 others with similar delinquency problems. For boys in both conditions, they and their adult caretakers participated in an assessment 3 months after initial placement. The assessment was designed to evaluate key treatment process variables thought to predict later outcomes: the extent to which the boy was well supervised, the level of consistent discipline he received, the extent to which he associated with delinquent peers, and the quality of the boy's relationship with his adult caretaker. Results on these variables are presented, as are results on outcomes: subsequent arrests, program completion rates, rates of running away from placement and number of days incarcerated in follow-up. A brief case study is included to illustrate the TFC treatment approach.