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Robert G. Lewis
Keeping the promise of a permanent home for every child.

What Do You Think? ^©

November 2001

Volume 3, Issue #1

Topic: Rethinking Concurrent Planning

Ideas: Concurrent planning has developed a bad reputation. With the idea of shared parenting, concurrent planning can be recast from a two-part plan into a single plan. It need not be so much a set of consequences as one plan with a continuum of parenting options.

Discussion: Concurrent planning has developed a negative edge. Many professionals and clients see it as a way to move children away from their birth parents more quickly. They view it as "Do the plan, do it now and do it our way or we have someone who will take your children." The "plan B" (alternative family) of concurrent planning may actually be the system’s secret "plan A". Some agencies don’t even think of concurrent planning unless there is some indication that the parents are not going to get-it-together.

But concurrent planning can be shared parenting. The new family adds parenting strengths to the birth family’s strengths. It isn’t a good family replacing a bad one; but rather one imperfect family supporting another. Shared parenting means finding the strengths that a family needs to successfully parent the children in the family. Shared parenting is additional parent(s) (day care, respite care, foster care, adoptive family) sharing their child rearing strength with the family of origin to provide good enough parenting for the child(ren)’s safety and well-being.

Even before a child needs to leave home for safety and well-being, a family can identify their own network of resources who can provide additional, necessary strengths to support and care for the child. Angelina let her social worker know that her son, Joey’s grandparents really have been a help and they might be able to do more to care for him and support her. If Joey has to leave home for safety reasons because she isn’t able to stay on her program, she has someone to share the parenting. And if that need for safety does not get resolved quickly, Joey has a safe, familiar place and an opportunity to develop without losing his mother. Angelina can actively plan for the care for her son from a few days respite to a lifetime of connection, from an overnight to adoption. Concurrent planning is about the child’s urgent needs not the system’s numbers crunch. Concurrent planning means there will be no youth-time of drift just because a kin or recruited family is helping out - it means really planning because "safe and secure" does matter for every child. And it matters urgently.

What Do You Think?    

11/19/01