Family Critical Time Intervention Essay

Homework Two: Homelessness

Homelessness is a problem with devastating consequences for individuals and their communities. Research has shown that people who are homeless are more likely to suffer from poor mental health, problems at school and problematic behavior. We usually focus on homeless adults who cannot find a good job and pay rent, but sometimes the ones who end up homeless are children and their single mothers. A recent longitudinal study wanted to see if Family Critical Time Intervention (FCTI) could reduce the negative consequences of homelessness in the children of single parents (Shinn, Samuels, Fischer, Thompkins, & Fowler, 2015).

Family Critical Time Intervention is different from other programs that reduce homelessness because it focuses on families that are currently in homeless shelters and uses three steps to get the family to have strong ties with the community, other people and social services. The steps include “Transition to community” in which the family gets a social worker who connects them to all the services they need in order to move into the community. The “Try out” phase is when the social worker provides the family with more independence

Life demands things from us such as money, food, education and if we are able to cope, we are successful. Homelessness can be described as an adaptation problem because people who are not able to make money, finish their education and meet the demands of everyday life are often the ones that end up without a house and a job. Of course, the demands depend on the setting of the individual and so different communities require different things from people (Kloos et al., 2012, p. 143). The article did not discuss in detail the reason why the families were homeless, but since the studied focused on mentally ill mothers and their children, we can say that perhaps their mental illness made it difficult for the mothers to get and keep a job that payed enough