Community Roundtable on Overloaded Families and Neglect

Why?

Children thrive when they have regular interactions with responsive, caring adults. Families experiencing significant stressors related to financial insecurity, housing instability, or the impact of systemic racism and interpersonal trauma can be overloaded with stress, interrupting those interactions. Over time, and without adequate supports, overloaded families can become vulnerable to adverse experiences, ranging from toxic levels of stress to involvement in the child welfare system, and even family separation for reasons of neglect.

How?

The Institute for Child and Family Well-Being is working to build a shared understanding of those challenges in an effort to support others’ work to improve families’ resilience and well-being. As part of this effort, you are invited to participate in the ICFW Roundtable on Overloaded Families: Challenges and Pathways Forward. This is the first of a series of roundtables, which aim to contribute to building a shared network, learning, and advocacy to prevent family adversity and separation and promote resilience and lifelong well-being across the communities we serve.

What?

This roundtable will be 90 minutes, with a brief overview of the impact of stress on family functioning, small group discussions, and sharing of insights from your experience to identify challenges and develop pathways forward.

• Everything that you share will be considered anonymous.

• We will develop a report based on what we learn from your participation, and will share it with you upon completing it.

What’s in it for you?

1. Build a wider network, so that you are more connected and supported in your work.

2. Share your lived experience and learn about what else is happening to support overloaded families, and inform and influence improved practices and policies.

3. Contribute to and evaluate impacts of these efforts on our shared, targeted outcome of reducing family separations for reasons of neglect.