Integrated family support: why this deserves attention now
72% of parents in families involved with youth care face issues such as debt, psychiatric problems, and/or addiction.
30% of parents do not receive treatment for this, when often that is precisely where the root of the problem lies
30% of children could return home — or might never have been placed out of home — if their parents had received the support they needed.
Where do we see opportunity for improvement?
Help and support for young people and the family are often fragmented across different laws, funding streams, desks and organizations. In families with high stress and stacking problems, ten to fifteen parties are regularly involved: from youth care and debt assistance to mental health care, compulsory education, work & income and WMO support. Everyone works hard, but not together as one.
Professionals often don’t know who else is involved with the same family. There’s a lack of direct communication: people don’t know each other, don’t have each other’s contact details, and schedules are full. On top of that, privacy regulations make information sharing complex. As a result, coordination can take weeks — during which debts increase, stress levels rise, and children experience growing pressure.
This presents a major opportunity: by organising support around families as one coordinated approach, we can intervene earlier, restore stability more quickly, and more often prevent the need for intensive youth care.
Sample case study – Sam
Sam’s story makes this concrete. Sam is 17 and lives in a youth care facility. He and his sisters were adopted from Colombia. From an early age, it was apparent that Sam struggled: he could suddenly become very angry and was extremely restless as a toddler. Sam is smart and started at grammar school, but became increasingly overstimulated and lost concentration. He came in contact with wrong friends and at 15 he attempted suicide. He is now receiving trauma therapy in the institution and it is helping him – but it comes late and is hugely invasive.
What Sam himself says gets to the heart of the matter: his mother had been asking for help for years when he was little, but that help never came. It raises a painful question: what if she had received support when Sam was one, two, or three years old? Would he be living in a residential facility today? Could his suicide attempt have been prevented? It shows what happens when parental issues are left unaddressed and we only step in once a child is already in deep crisis.
What is needed?
Families like Sam’s primarily need clarity, coherence, and timely support. That starts with a single point of contact who sees the family as a whole and works with them to understand what’s really going on. Not a series of disconnected interventions, but support based on one shared, explanatory analysis — developed by professionals from different fields, together with the family.
From that analysis, we can do what proves necessary in multi-stress families time and again:
put the basics in order. So before we put children in heavy trajectories or place them out of the home, we work on the causes that feed insecurity and stress at home. Think about tackling debt, ensuring a healthy and safe home, more peace and stability for parents, structure in daily life and space to work on their own problems. Only when that foundation is solid will there be room for parenting and for children to develop safely.
Our approach
EHdK works in partnership with youth care services, mental health and addiction care, and organisations in the social domain to establish integrated family teams: one team around the family, with one plan, one point of contact, and clear communication lines. Setting up these teams involves three steps:
- Explore with a working group
Together with the municipality and involved organizations we explore what is needed to get an integrated family team off the ground. We determine: which partners belong in the team, how to organize access and direction, how to process data in a secure way, which business and financial agreements should be made and what does this require from professionals and management. - Pilot run and evaluate
We start with a pilot team that supports families according to the integral working method. We monitor continuously: does it succeed in acting faster, is there one clear analysis and plan, and do families notice that the help is really coherent? On this basis, we sharpen our working methods, agreements and team structure. - Structural implementation with mid-term evaluation
After the pilot follows structural deployment of the team. EHdK continues to support learning and adjustment. In this way we ensure that integrated family support does not remain a project, but a permanent way of working.
EHdK supports the entire process: from design to method. We help teams to analyze integrally, prioritize together and ensure that “basis op orde” actually becomes the starting point of integral family assistance.
Current situation
Integrated family support is not only necessary — it’s also feasible. At present, one integrated family team is active in the municipality of Smallingerland. In addition, exploratory work is underway in two other municipalities in Friesland, and funding for family support in the Friesland and Drenthe regions has been secured through the IZA transformation plans. Step by step, we are building an approach that shows integrated family support is possible within the current system — as long as we organise it together.
More?
Want to know more?
Would you like to spar about what EHdK with integral family assistance can do for your organization? Please contact our colleague Jenneke Aartsen.