When a teenage girl is referred to Morrison’s Rosemont residential facility, both the girl and the staff have their work cut out for them. These are young women who have defied the best efforts of other programs to help them. But even with Rosemont’s special expertise in reaching young women with multiple problems, recidivism rates once the youth leaves Rosemont have been discouragingly high. Now, Rosemont may have found at least a partial solution to this pattern: engaging the girls’ families.

Rosemont’s history of helping severely traumatized teen girls is impressive, given that 90 percent of the girls have been abused or neglected and most come from homes where drugs and alcohol are common. These youth are clinically depressed, most likely abuse substances themselves and are chronic runaways. After working intensely with Rosemont staff, most demonstrate significant emotional and mental improvement. But long term outcomes have not been as successful, often as a result of lingering family issues that haven’t been resolved.

Some family counseling had been available to girls and their families. But its usefulness was limited by various barriers. Families were reluctant to examine their internal dynamics, due to shame and embarrassment over the circumstances that led to the youth’s referral to Rosemont. In addition, these low-income families faced logistical obstacles such as transportation and child care.

To overcome these barriers, Rosemont developed a program offering multi-family group sessions. These groups focus on three critical issues in the girl’s healing: education about existing support systems that families can turn to for help going forward; transitioning from residential treatment to independent living; and psychotherapy designed to raise painful issues and work to resolve them.

The decision to bring more than one family to the table in these group sessions proved to be crucial to the program’s success. When placed in a setting with other families confronting similar histories, the family members were more comfortable with the process.

Since its launch in 2002, Rosemont’s family engagement program has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from participating families. 90% of families reported that the sessions were helpful and nearly 90% experienced improved family functioning. Families like Georgia’s were able to make the changes necessary to allow their troubled and hard-to-manage daughters to come back home and start life again. Many say the presence of other families in the sessions who faced the same issues helped them confront behaviors and interactions that were destroying their families. In addition to these successes, Morrison has gained valuable insight into measures that we can take to help some of our most damaged clients make the grade in the outside world.

Family engagement sets the stage for Georgia’s family to reunite