Functional Family Therapy is a family-oriented approach that can help identify the underlying issues and challenges contributing to family concerns. Sometimes, juvenile justice workers will refer young people and their families to Functional Family Therapy to engage the entire family as a unit. The rationality behind this is to recognize that family support and involvement significantly impacts juvenile probation’s success.
This therapy uses a 5-step approach to support families in the process of juvenile probation.
Step 1: Therapists strive to cultivate an environment to listen, respect, and understand family members in a way that is empathetic and respectful of individual, family, and cultural beliefs, values and perspectives.
Step 2: Therapist assist in managing meaningful family relationships by suggesting possible alternatives, promoting nonjudgmental perspectives, and revealing acceptance and sensitivity to diversity.
Step 3: Therapists collect insight into the rationale behind family members’ behaviors. A good grasp on understanding these behaviors sets the stage for planning in the following two stages: Behavior Change and Generalization, where interventions are linked to the families’ relational functions.
Step 4: Behavior Change in the next step, which includes precise strategies that explicitly address family processes such as conflict resolution, emotional regulation, even depression and substance use. These techniques include evidence-based family- and cognitive-behavioral strategies to address family functioning problems.
Step 5: Therapists extend positive functioning for the family to incorporate it into new situations and plan for relapse prevention. Therapist will also integrate community systems into the treatment process as well.
Having these programs and resources at hand proves and emphasizes the importance of building authentic partnerships with families, addressing underlying problems and developing skills and resources to support long-term progress. Conclusively, the importance of the network between probation officers, young people, and their families on juvenile probation should not be minimized. When probation officers work along side the youth and their family, they can achieve greater outcomes and increase compliance with what is required.
Probation officers must prioritize communication, trust and work to conquer barriers and differences. Probation officers have the ability to positively impact a young person’s life, essentially helping with breaking the cycle of relapsing back to the juvenile justice system. If you or anyone you know may be in need of assistance contact Philadelphia Family Voices Today!