We worked with a vulnerable family recently where the children were at risk of being removed from their home. Their mom needed some help in her addiction recovery journey and with parenting skills. This was all support our team could provide, but we were almost too late.

The family couldn’t pay their gas bill. The house was cold, and the children were nearly removed as a result.

Thankfully, we were able to step in just in time. The first thing we did was help them get the heat back on. Then we could begin working alongside them to help keep the kids at home, where they were most comfortable — and get the mother the help and support she needed.

These sorts of need-based adaptations are essential for real, sustainable partnerships with families who are struggling. And these sorts of adaptations are also part of the reason why more than 90% of the families we support — families who otherwise would be immediately separated for child welfare concerns — end up remaining safely together after 28 days of in-home partnership.

To be sure, in some cases, separation is necessary. It’s important to keep kids safe. It’s also important to make sure they’re healthy, resilient and minimally traumatized by welfare interventions.

Research shows that keeping children with their immediate families or with kin is often vastly superior as a welfare intervention — both in terms of financial feasibility and long-term welfare outcomes — than placing them with the foster care homes run by even the most loving and diligent strangers.

When children are removed from their homes — no matter how much they might genuinely need to be removed, and no matter how wonderful their foster placement — there is always the compounding trauma of being inserted suddenly into an utterly new home life.

They’re removed from everything they know. Their classmates change, their home changes, their routines are lost. Sometimes they’re separated from their siblings. There’s commonly very little contact with their biological parents in the immediate wake of the separation.

The link isn’t direct, of course, but the long-term outcomes for kids who enter traditional foster care show that the trauma lingers.

They struggle with behavioral issues, both in the long and short term. They tend to experience homelessness, mental illness and incarceration more often than peer cohorts who haven’t entered foster care. But family and kinship care appear to demonstrably improve these outcomes.

That’s partly because many of the more emotionally difficult and potentially traumatic components of a foster care placement — sudden loss of contact with parents, a change in culture, a change in environment and a change in place — are minimized when close kin take the children in.

They’re eliminated altogether, of course, when the children stay in their home. And avoiding or minimizing trauma to children is one of the primary benefits of family-strengthening efforts and kinship care alike. It is a critical part of good and sustainable child welfare work.

That’s why we’re trying to keep even the most at-risk families together. Some especially vulnerable families need urgent, intensive, intentional support — but they can still stay outside of the foster care system, with our help.

The Homebuilders model aims to support and partner with families as they learn to thrive within their own homes. We seek to give every parent, no matter their struggle, the opportunity to learn the skills and support they need to be the best parent they can be — and to keep their children home, safe and loved.

Many of the families we partner with struggle with mental illness, addiction issues, neglect and family conflict. Our partnerships with these families are urgent interventions during the point of crisis.

Homebuilders isn’t just aimed at generally improving the welfare of just any family; it’s about holistic, wraparound care to move especially vulnerable families through and out of crises with the tools they need to avoid them in the future.

But this care is essential, if we truly want what’s best for children. These families don’t need to be broken up. They need to be helped. They need to be heard.

And helping the most vulnerable children has to start and end with listening to their needs. And what they need most is family. Residential care simply doesn’t provide what they need, because what they need is the love and security a family gives  them.

Every child deserves to feel safe, loved and connected. Every given family deserves the chance to provide that for them. We need to commit — and can commit — to a model of child welfare that empowers and uplifts families as its primary way of honoring and defending vulnerable children’s needs.

There are a lot of ways to keep kids out of foster care. The first step is deciding to try. The next step, in many cases, is as tragically simple as listening to them and to their needs with an open heart. They might just need help getting the heat back on, if only we have ears to hear their request.

Together, we can work through even the most difficult situations to help transform the most vulnerable households into safe, stable homes for the next generation to grow up.