'Thoughts' about Preserving and Empowering Families through Co-Parenting Partnerships.

In the traditional family preservation model, a family's integrity is preserved by keeping children in the care of their immediate or extended families. Family reunification has involved safely returning children to the custody of their families after a period of foster care. However, families are not preserved solely by family members maintaining close physical proximity to their members. Most families develop strong emotional and kinship bonds that perpetuate the history and culture of the family. Therefore, when rethinking the concept of family preservation services, it is useful to think in terms of activities that protect a family's history and culture; preserve its familial, cultural, and ethnic identity and connections; and safeguard the kinship bonds between children and their "psychological family" and culture of origin. In this context, a child's removal and placement into another family can be an effort to preserve the family, as is the case in coparenting. Coparenting involves planned and focused activities to create a parenting partnership in which the child's family and the foster family share a commitment to ensure the well-being of the child while preserving the child's emotional connections to family and culture. Coparenting is well-suited for facilitating family restorations, overcoming barriers of cross-race and cross-cultural placements, responding to child neglect, and preparing a child for permanent placement with another family. (MM)