Therapeutic foster care is a form of mental health service delivery for youths who cannot be served in their own homes. The approach was developed as a way to offer the least-restrictive and most-integrated out-of-home mental health services as it provides an alternative to institutional care, group and residential care, and incarceration. Typically, the approach involves using a team planning process to put in place an intensive, individualized, strength-based plan of care. Specially trained therapeutic foster parents implement therapeutic care through a home-like environment. Like foster care in general, therapeutic foster care aims to return children to their homes or to a permanent placement in a home-like setting. The hoped-for transition out of therapeutic foster care, then, necessarily means that programs provide services not only to the child but also, where appropriate, to the child’s family.
The hallmark of therapeutic foster care is the establishment of a positive...
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Levesque, R.J.R. (2011). Therapeutic Foster Care. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_207
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