The effectiveness of the Children's Receiving Home Infant Mental Health program for facilitating successful transition into foster care

Every year thousands of young children enter the foster care system in California. Many of these children have difficulty transitioning into their new foster care home and are ultimately moved multiple times from place to place. Early childhood is considered an important time for developing healthy attachments, and children who suffer maltreatment and multiple placements are at great risk for future mental health issues.;The Children's Receiving Home (CRH) of Sacramento implemented an Infant Mental Health Services Program to provide mental health treatment and support to children ages 1 to 5, who have been removed from their home due to maltreatment. The CRH services include preplacement visits with the foster care parents, clinician visits to the home postplacement, individual therapy, and group therapy. One of the goals of the CRH Infant Mental Health Services Program is to prepare the children for the transition into their foster care placement and to reduce the likelihood that the placement will be disrupted. This study examined the effectiveness of the Infant Mental Health Services Program for reducing future foster care placement disruptions.;It was hypothesized that by providing the child with therapeutic interventions and infant mental health services there will be increased stability in placement. The study examined archival data from two separate groups of children who previously stayed at the CRH. The first group of children resided at the CRH before the Infant Mental Health Services Program was implemented. The second group of children received infant mental health services. Placement transitions were tracked for each child, and the groups were compared using an independent samples t test. No significant differences were found between the two groups examined in the main hypotheses. It was found that overall the children who leave the CRH tend to have stability in their first placement.;Post hoc correlations were conducted to examine whether specific services may have been more or less beneficial for increasing placement stability within the experimental group. Due to the small sample size, few relationships were found. There was, however, a negative correlation found between the number of preplacement visits and placement moves.