Keeping Families Together: How Early Support Can Prevent Foster Care Entry

A Cuyahoga County family's experience shows how personalized support can help parents overcome barriers, build stability, and keep children safely at home.

Child safety is at the heart of Ohio’s child welfare system. When a child is living in unsafe conditions, a highly trained and robust children’s services workforce is essential to respond quickly, protect that child, and ensure they have a safe and stable place to grow.

But not every child in a family experiencing hardship is unsafe.

Sometimes, families are struggling to meet their basic needs for food, stable housing, child care, transportation, employment, or health care. Parents may need education, connections to community resources, or access to someone who can help them navigate systems that can be difficult to understand.

When families experience multiple challenges at once, they can quickly build on one another. A lack of child care can make it difficult to maintain employment. Without steady employment, finding safe and affordable housing becomes harder. Transportation challenges can lead to missed appointments. For a parent trying to manage several of these barriers while caring for young children, stress and instability can grow.

Identifying these families early can make a difference. In our Early Childhood Dashboard, we found that 4,630 Ohio children ages 0–5 were in Public Children Services Agency custody in 2024, with the average stay in state custody lasting two years. For a young child, two years represents a significant portion of their earliest years of development. This makes it even more important to identify families who can safely remain together and provide support early, before challenges escalate to the point that more intensive intervention may be needed.

Prevention in Action: Helping Families Stay Together

One family’s experience with Ohio’s Safe Babies program in Cuyahoga County demonstrates the impact of individualized, prevention-oriented support. This mother relocated to Ohio with her four young children while navigating her family’s needs for housing, food, transportation, child care, employment, benefits, and services in a new state. One of her children also had significant medical needs.

This family came to the attention of children’s services when one of her children experienced an accidental injury. A Safe Babies Ohio Community Coordinator began working with the family while an in-home children’s services case was open, meeting regularly with the mother to help her understand what was expected of her, connect her to resources, and work through barriers one at a time. These consistent touchpoints also meant another trusted professional was regularly seeing the family and children while helping the mother build toward greater stability.

The individualized support this mother received ultimately led to the successful closure of her children’s services case, while the children remained safely with their mother. While the Safe Babies team was able to keep this family together and prevent entry into the foster care system, this family’s challenges did not disappear when the case closed. For example, a lingering court case created additional barriers to securing employment and supporting the family’s economic needs. The Safe Babies Community Coordinator remained involved during this transition, helping mom understand and navigate the process until the court matter was resolved. With that barrier addressed, the mother was able to find employment.

Housing was another challenge. The family’s original home was not the safest long-term environment for the children but was given the disruptions to her employment. Rather than directing her to find better housing without support, the Safe Babies Community Coordinator helped her navigate the process of finding a safer home within her budget.

In less than a year, this family moved from navigating multiple overlapping challenges to having greater stability and the knowledge and tools to manage many of those challenges independently. Early identification and support can be the difference between children staying with their loving parent or entering the care of strangers.

Providing the Right Support at the Right Time

Caseworkers with children’s services agencies are responsible for protecting children and often carry many cases at once. They cannot always provide the level of ongoing, individualized navigation that a family facing multiple economic and social barriers may need. Programs like Safe Babies can complement, not replace, the child welfare system by providing that additional layer of support.

A Community Coordinator can meet with a family more frequently, help a parent understand complicated systems, connect them to the right community resources, and follow up when a referral alone is not enough.

While programs like Safe Babies Ohio can help identify family needs and intervene before entry into foster care, prevention does not mean overlooking abuse, neglect, or legitimate safety concerns. A robust child welfare system is critical to intervene when children are unsafe, but when community-based programs can help address family needs when parents feel stuck or unsure where to turn, child welfare professionals have greater capacity to focus their time and resources on children experiencing serious safety concerns.

This family’s case demonstrates the importance of creating a bridge between formal systems and managing their needs independently. A closed case with children’s services does not automatically make housing challenges, transportation barriers, or financial instability disappear. Programs like Safe Babies can help create that temporary bridge.  For this family, less than a year of consistent support and education helped the mother find employment, move into safer housing, resolve her legal case, better understand the systems around her, and develop tools she could continue accessing after Safe Babies stepped away.

This approach also connects to larger state and federal goals. Ohio recently joined the federal A Home for Every Child initiative, supported by the Ohio Department of Children and Youth (DCY), which focuses on ensuring a safe foster home is available for every child who needs one while reducing foster care entry through effective prevention. DCY has also set a statewide goal of reducing foster care entries to 2.0 per 1,000 children by 2029. Ohio Safe Babies aligns with both priorities by strengthening prevention efforts that help more families safely stay together, while ensuring children who cannot remain at home have access to safe, stable placements.

Protecting Ohio’s children requires a continuum of supports and services, recognizing that no solution is one-size-fits-all. When a family needs protection-focused intervention, that response must be available. Prevention is essential, and also more nuanced. Families may need education, economic support, service navigation, or someone to walk alongside them for a period of time while they stabilize. These needs do not reflect individual inadequacies, but highlight opportunities for Ohio’s systems to recognize where families fall through gaps, and create solutions to ensure families can stay together.