
National Reunification Month, observed annually in June, recognizes the people and ongoing efforts around the country that help families stay together. It is also a time to recommit to strengthening, improving, and increasing those efforts all year long.
This year’s theme, "Reunification: Shifting Power and Reconnecting Families All Year Long," focuses on:
- When children cannot safely remain with their parents and need to enter foster care, reunifying them with family remains the primary goal
- Authentic, equitable family engagement and integrating the voice of children, youth, and families into the case planning and court processes
- Enhancing birth parent-foster parent partnerships to improve the foster care experience for children, youth, and parents when a child’s removal from the home is necessary and to support reunification
Throughout its history, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Children's Bureau (CB) has assisted parents, children, and youth involved with foster care; engaged families in decisions that affect their lives; and supported foster families, kinship caregivers, child welfare professionals, and others who help affected children. It is important to ensure that all children and youth in foster care feel safe and supported.
When children are removed from their families to ensure their safety, the goal is to reunite them with their families as quickly as possible. As with all ACF programs, the COVID-19 pandemic affected foster care and reunification processes. With the nation now beginning to recover from the pandemic, Reunification Month may have special significance this year as many are able to reunite with family after spending months—or even years—separated.
To support safe and stable families, returning children from foster care to their homes often requires intensive, family-centered services, tailored to each family’s circumstances and addressing the issue(s) causing the child to enter foster care. Many different strategies that build on family strengths are used throughout the reunification process including family engagement; maintaining family and cultural connections; connecting families to evidenced-based services in the community; regular and frequent visits among family members with the caseworker present; and parent education.
Positive partnerships between birth parents , caregivers, caseworkers, and older youth increase the chances of successful reunifications. The most effective foster caregivers, whether kin or non-relatives, encourage reunification by extending their role beyond supporting the children in their care to supporting the children’s whole family. Connecting with birth parents as soon as possible and keeping communication open and honest from the start can help build a strong and ongoing partnership.
Kinship care — placing children with relatives — can help maintain family connections and cultural traditions that can minimize the trauma of family separation, relieve anxieties that come with traditional foster placements, and encourage reunification . Often, children, youth and their parents feel more comfortable with support from family members, encouraging parents to seek help and providing the child or youth with a sense of belonging and protection.
Recognizing that we have a long way to go, Reunification Month also offers an opportunity to address the racial disproportionalities and disparities in the child welfare system. Data shows that Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native children are at greater risk of being removed from their homes than other children. ACF is committed to driving policies that reduce these disparities. Culturally competent resources can greatly help with the reunification process of these children.
To support reunification efforts, in 2021 the CB awarded cooperative agreements to five organizations though their discretionary grant program. The objectives are to:
- implement and evaluate practices and interventions that provide an array of kinship preparation services and ongoing kinship supports; and
- promote shared parenting to build trusting relationships between all out-of-home caregivers and parents of children and youth in foster care to ensure parents and families remain actively involved in normal child-rearing activities.
These grants will help further promote reunification by securing strong partnerships needed to effectively and efficiently select practices and interventions, program implementation, and evaluation activities, as well as meaningfully engage parents, relatives, kin caregivers, youth, foster parents, and alumni of foster care.
Reunification Month is an important recognition of the mission we focus on every day at ACF. My thanks to the leader of the CB, Aysha Schomburg and the entire CB team for pushing us forward to live out the mission to reunify families as one way of supporting the well-being of all families and children.
About the Child Welfare Information Gateway
The Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of ACF CB, promotes the safety, permanency, and well-being of children, youth, and families by connecting child welfare, adoption, and related professionals as well as the public to information, resources, and tools covering topics on child welfare, child abuse and neglect, out-of-home care, adoption, and more. They provide access to print and electronic publications, websites, databases, and online learning tools for improving child welfare practice, including resources that can be shared with families. Throughout this month, they will be conducting outreach to support the promotion of Reunification month .