Effective intervention in child protective services: Learning from parents

Sixty-one parents, mainly mothers, in two mid-size Ontario (Canada) cities were interviewed about their experiences with Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies, one in each city. The interviewers took a semi-structured approach that focussed on learning about the challenges in the parents' daily lives (to be reported in a future paper), and their perceptions of CPS interventions. Four researchers, including the three authors, developed a coding scheme to analyze the interviews, using the qualitative software package QSR NUD*IST Vivo. The findings indicated that parents valued good referrals, concrete help, and emotional support, although the latter was mentioned by only a minority of parents. Their most negative experiences were: having their initial requests for help turned down; being accepted for service, but not receiving much help; being unfairly treated or harrassed; and being traumatized by the sudden, police-like removal of their children. The paper discusses how the context of these two agencies may have contributed to the findings: increasing poverty among families with children, and the effects of an ultra-conservative government, who introduced a legalistic, investigative agenda for CPS beginning in 1995. The paper discusses how workers and agencies could modify services to maximize the parents' positive experiences and minimize their negative experiences.