Children’s Aid offers comprehensive, home-based services to keep families together after destabilizing events or ongoing crises, ensuring that children are safe and thriving.

There is no limit to what children can achieve when their families are strong. For some parents, however, the stresses of poverty and the compounded difficulties with limited resources create an unhealthy and sometimes dangerous family life. Our homemaking and preventive services staff go into the home, helping families come together in health.

A plan for each family

For more than 35 years, Children’s Aid has provided individualized service plans to meet each family’s specific needs. Our interventions enhance relationships, help alleviate triggers that lead to unhealthy behaviors, and help parents learn to manage their responses. 

General Preventive Programs

We provide an array of services to help families function better day to day to ensure a safe and nurturing environment for their children with a reduced risk of child abuse and maltreatment. Our experienced team of highly trained bilingual and multicultural social workers address parent-child conflict, truancy, child behavioral issues, substance use, domestic violence, housing, and stressors related to poverty. 

Staff work in families’ homes and their communities for approximately one year. They use some combination of family and individual counseling, parenting education and support, community advocacy, and concrete assistance assessing resources. To qualify, families must have a child under 18 years old in the household and live in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, or Staten Island. 

Intensive Preventive Programs

Some family situations require more rigorous interventions to reach stability — especially when children reach adolescence. These services are designed for families facing diverse challenges, including truancy or other school problems, substance abuse, escalated behavior issues, and more. Social workers use the Functional Family, Multidimensional, and Multisystemic Therapy models during the course of three to five months to make lasting improvements in the home.

Our families are referred to us by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and other community-based agencies. In some cases, families request our help directly.

Homemaking Services

Our Homemaking Services staff provide temporary in-home support to struggling parents. Homemakers model household and child care responsibilities to support the parent in providing a safe living home environment. Families are referred to Homemaking Services through New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services. 
 

Children and Family Treatment and Support Services

The Children and Family Treatment and Support Services (CFTSS) program was designed to provide mental health services to children and their families outside of the traditional clinical setting. Services are provided in the client’s home and community. CFTSS works with families who have Medicaid or Medicaid managed care and who have children ages 0-21.

A Safe Way Forward

A Safe Way Forward is a preventive program working with families affected by intimate partner violence (IPV). This joint preventive-clinical service model offers comprehensive trauma-informed services to the whole family, including the survivor, the person causing harm (PCH), and the children exposed to the IPV. Our services include in-home visitation, crisis intervention, advocacy, trauma-informed individual therapy, group counseling/psychoeducation, and referrals to other appropriate services. All families referred must have an active, court-ordered supervision case and must have at least one parent residing in the Bronx.