Intensive Family Intervention

Underdue Social Services, Inc. provides Intensive Family Intervention Services to identified families who meet the inclusionary criteria for treatment. Strategies are designed to integrate children into their natural environment in a positive, prosocial way, and to assist parents in meeting the needs of their children. Through the provision of Intensive Family Intervention Services (IFI), Underdue Social Services, Inc. seek to help parents develop the capacity to meet the needs of their children and avoid out of home placement wherever possible.

A multi-system view of children’s behavior is a function of their relationship with their ecology. The child’s connections with key people in various naturally occurring systems include family members at home, teachers, administrators, peers at school, and other adults and peers in the neighborhood and community. Underdue Social Services, Inc. assumes that these key people each have some degree of understanding and influence over the behavior of the child. Underdue Social Services, Inc. views the child as following a developmental path of increasing various competencies that lead to successful adulthood and that problem behavior results from a failure to develop needed competencies.

Underdue Social Services, Inc. seeks to employ key members of the child’s ecology to teach, coach, encourage, empower and demand the development of competencies as a means to reduce problem behavior. 

Goals for In-home Intensive Family Intervention Therapeutic Services

• To ensure that children are actively and successfully engaged in socially appropriate activities including school, vocational training/job placement, and approved recreational activities.
• To ensure that children are living with family and successfully adhering to rules and expectations.
• To ensure that children are actively and successfully engaged with developmentally appropriate prosocial peers and activities in the community.
• To empower parents and other primary caregivers to successfully manage the needs of the child.
• To decrease the incidence of subsequent reports of child abuse or neglect.
• To limit the need of out-of-home placement of children.
• To reduce the need of intervention by formal support systems in the community.
• To strengthen the family’s natural support system of extended family, friends, neighbors, church and community supports.
• To strengthen the family’s relationship with the various systems that naturally interacts with the child including school, employers, peers and their families, and community providers of youth activities, training and recreation.
• To decrease incidence of subsequent crimes committed by children receiving IFI services.

Service Delivery

IFI services are provided in the home or community by trained therapist who each carries small caseloads. Therapist will be Master’s level or highly clinically skilled Bachelor’s level mental health professionals. Each therapist will carry a caseload of six to eight families. Service durations will be approximately three months. Therapist will be available to families 24 hours a day by cell phone.  IFI teams are composed of a License Therapist, Masters level individual counselor and a Bachelor’s Behavioral Aide. Team members provide intensive treatment ranging from 6-12 hours a week. Services are individualized according to the youth and family’s needs. Family Team meetings are held on a monthly basis to ensure treatment goals are obtained.

Underdue Social Services, Inc. utilizes a family centered care approach to treatment. Family-centered care is an approach to the planning, delivery and evaluation of care that is grounded in mutually beneficial partnerships among consumers, families and mental health professionals. “Families” are understood to be anyone whom consumers regard as significant in their lives, such as parents, legal guardians domestic partners, grandparents or close friends. Family-centered care focuses on individuals’ and families’ strengths instead of their limitations, with appreciation for diversity across racial, geographic, age and economic lines. In family-centered families are encouraged to participate in treatment planning decisions in ways the consumer and family choose.

After Care Services

Underdue Social Services, Inc. follows families on a monthly basis after services has ended for the first three months and on a quarterly basis for the first year afterwards. Each family serviced by Underdue Social Services will be provided with a written aftercare/stepdown plan to ensure the continuity of services. Outcome Measurements and deliverables will also be collected and provided to stakeholders.