A practice model for enhancing effective coping in child welfare families.

Some degree of stress is of necessity associated with child welfare interventions. This stress adds to that already present in service consumers' situations. This article offers help to child welfare students and beginning practitioners in understanding and reducing the kinds of stress involved in child welfare interventions. Most families involved with the child welfare system struggle in some way to manage their lives effectively. For many, the demands of daily living outweigh, at least temporarily, their ability to cope with the stressors they encounter. To help these families, the child welfare system offers a variety of interventions. Each intervention, however, comes with its own price. Each intervention-investigation, assessment, family preservation, therapy, drug treatment, child placement, termination of parental rights, and so on-adds stress to an already stressful situation. This intervention-related stress complicates each of the initial intervention tasks. These tasks include building relationships with consumers and using these relationships to gather information and make accurate assessments. When interventions are stressful, consumers' reactions to them may hinder relationship-building efforts, especially when consumers' attempts to cope are misinterpreted by practitioners as resistance or disinterest. Even if positive therapeutic relationships form, consumers' reactions to intervention stress may cloud family processes. Practitioners may find themselves wondering, "Is this the way this family generally lives, or is this their reaction to the current crisis?" Without the establishment of practitionerconsumer relationships and the accurate assessments they allow, thoughtful, prompt case decisions are difficult to achieve. This article seeks to enhance practitioners' efforts to help families cope with child welfare interventions. Use of the procedures outlined may help practitioners and families build consumerpractitioner relationships, assess family processes, generate ideas on how families can cope with intervention-related stressors, and ultimately help alter the circumstances and behaviors that lead to families' involvement in the system. After crucial concepts from the stress and coping literature are discussed, an interactive system that assesses intervention stressors and consumers' responses to them is presented. Because the child placement intervention involves a variety of intervention-induced stressors, child placement is used to exemplify these concepts. Stress and Coping: Crucial Concepts Although research into how people cope with stressful events has grown dramatically, it has not yet yielded a clear picture of what effective coping looks like. Even less is known about how to help people learn to cope effectively. Coping research and theory lends itself, however, to several conclusions that may be helpful to child welfare practitioners. Three are highlighted in this article: (1) the coping demands of each situation are different; (2) active, problem-focused coping is more effective than other kinds of coping; and (3) perceptions of control over the stressor are crucial. The Coping Demands of Each Situation Are Different Every stressful situation carries with it different facets with which one may or may not be able to cope. These are sometimes called the coping demands, or demand characteristics, of a coping situation. Individuals respond in varying ways to different kinds of stressors [Folkman et al. 1986; McCrae 1984], and the effectiveness of coping strategies differs by the demand characteristics of the stressor [Mattlin et al. 1990]. For example, effective coping after a heart attack and effective coping after the death of a loved one may involve very different kinds of processes because the kinds of stress involved are so different. Several writers and researchers have begun categorizing the kinds of coping demands that situations may present. …