At quality parenting centers, Conn. child welfare agency creates a home-like setting

Devon Cox is in the process of reunifying with his 7-year-old daughter and hopes to begin reunifying with his youngest, who is nearly one. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

HARTFORD, Conn. — When the state removed Devon Cox’s two young daughters from his Hartford home last August, he felt a slew of emotions: fear about being separated from his children, confusion about what had happened and anger that they weren’t living with him anymore.

But in the intervening nine months, Cox has come to see a silver lining he did not anticipate: a reunification process that has not only strengthened his relationships with his daughters, but has made him a better father.

After months of working with a state program that aims to strengthen families by making family visits easier, his 6-year-old is set to move back in next month. He hopes his youngest, who is almost 1, will also be returned home soon.

Cox participated in one of the state’s 12 Quality Parenting Centers, which are designed to allow mothers and fathers to spend time with their children in a more home-like environment rather than the sterile atmosphere of a state office. Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is looking to expand the model and open more quality parenting centers because officials say there’s increasing demand for the service.

“Me going there, it honestly helped me a lot,” said Cox. “Like when I mean a lot, a lot. Like tears, I can let them out there. I feel like me there. That’s the difference.”

Cox, 23, temporarily lost custody of his daughters after he and the baby’s mother woke up one day, saw marks on the infant’s skin they thought might be blood clots and brought her to Hartford Hospital. Cox said he doesn’t know how the marks appeared, but DCF determined that the girls should live with his mother for awhile.

“I’m happy that I … went through this experience, even though it was a bad experience,” Cox said, referring to the loss of custody. “But I took it on the brighter side. And things that I felt as though I needed to know and needed to learn, I took that on.”

Cox also participated in Fatherhood Engagement Services, which helps fathers whose children are in foster care be more present in their children’s lives. Both the fatherhood initiative and the parenting center have helped him get structure back in his life as he plans for the future.

It’s been helpful, he said, to talk more openly with other fathers about mental health and its role in familial relationships, in the fatherhood program. He just got an internship with the program to help other men in similar situations stay involved in their kids’ lives.

“It’s like, they kind of got me on the stride that I’m in right now,” Cox said. “It’s just beast mode.”

A ‘sense of belonging’

DCF operates 12 Quality Parenting Centers now at locations around the state and plans to open an additional three, said Michael Williams, DCF’s deputy director.

The model is primarily meant to help families who have open child welfare cases with DCF but are in the process of reunification, meaning that the children will eventually go back to their biological families. In those cases, the state typically has a set of requirements for parents, such as classes they need to take or goals they need to accomplish, to get their children back home.

Quality Parenting Centers across Connecticut have capacity for about 46,500 visits annually, according to DCF.

The Mosaic Parenting Center — a three-story historic house in Hartford — is a place where parents like Cox can spend time with their children. Each room for family visits is set up to mimic a living room with oversized couches, stacks of toys and displays of children’s books.

Cox has mostly visited the Mosaic center with his youngest daughter. He already knew some of the skills they teach, such as how to do tummy time or how to give a baby a bath. But he said the experience was good for the family. He got to spend more quality time with her.

After some time at the center, Cox started doing visits separately from the baby’s mother. The two co-parent but aren’t together anymore. Individual visits helped him bond with the baby, helped him open up around her, he said.

Staff at the parenting center oversee the visits and offer tips on the best ways to take care of kids. They do pre- and post-visits with parents to talk about what went well and what could be improved and offer guidance on topics such as appropriate developmental play.

“We have a sense of belonging and welcoming for our parents,” said Kyeesha Clayborne, director of residential services at The Bridge Family Center, the nonprofit that operates the Hartford Quality Parenting Center. “We have everything they need, really. And it is really important that we make them feel comfortable, that they want to come to their visits.”

Everything in the Hartford house, from the book selections featuring different languages and art featuring characters with different body types, to the setup of the rooms with easily movable changing tables, play mats and cribs, is meant to promote inclusivity, staff with The Bridge Family Center said.

The Hartford parenting center launched in 2022, and The Bridge is looking for ways to expand the work. Since a group home in Harwinton run by the organization closed, DCF has asked The Bridge to look into an expansion of their parenting services.

The Harwinton home closed last year following allegations of physical and sexual abuse, a lack of supervision of kids and insufficient therapeutic care for children with histories of severe trauma.

They’re looking at buildings in the Middletown and Meriden areas for a new parenting center, executive director Margaret Hann said.

The Bridge reports to DCF about how family visits are going, but staff there don’t make recommendations about who should have guardianship of the children, Hann said. Most of the families who come to the center have a goal of reunification, but a few don’t.

“Sometimes it’s the goal for families to redefine the relationship with their children,” Hann said. “Their parental rights have been terminated. But it’s part of the DCF treatment plan that says parents can still have some type of relationship with that child. That’s what we try to work towards.”

Most of the families who come to the center have younger children. The program is meant for newborns and children up to age 13, although older siblings can be included. The majority of the cases are children 8 and younger, Clayborne said.

The center serves about 45 families per week, who work with The Bridge for about six months at a time, Clayborne said. 

In addition to the coaching and visitation services, the centers provide canned food, soap and other household goods. Parents can also get professional clothes for job interviews from the center and bus passes to make it to their visits.

At Christmastime, they host an event in which parents can “shop” for gifts by looking through donated toys. The parents can pick what they think their children would like the most, wrap it and give it to the children themselves.

Cox said he hopes he can take this experience and ensure his children never have to wonder when they’re going to see him next. He recalls times from his childhood, calling his incarcerated father, to ask when he was coming home.

“I always told myself, I wouldn’t ever want my kid to ever have to be like, ‘Oh, Daddy, when are you coming home?’” Cox said, tears forming in his eyes.

The first Quality Parenting Center opened in 2021 in Manchester. The Village for Children and Families, a Hartford-based nonprofit, operates it.

Two things happened simultaneously to drive the creation of the centers: a need for more space for quality visits between parents and their children, and the decline of residential group homes, Williams said.

At the time, DCF had a high number of vacancies in group homes — sometimes around 60% of beds were vacant, Williams said. So the department decided to close some group homes and move resources to a new program.

The visits at the area regional offices weren’t meeting families’ needs, particularly for those on the track to reunify, he added.

“The quality of those visits was pretty poor because they were happening inside of the area offices, in spaces that are kind of sterile and not necessarily conducive to quality parenting for parents to really parent their children,” Williams said. “It’s equivalent to an office space, with corporate walls, no windows, things like that. And parents are there spending time but not necessarily having quality time and quality parenting.”

Williams said he’d worked on a similar project in Florida, where he was the president and chief executive of Our Kids, a child welfare service provider.

Nationally, more states are undertaking projects that aim to help reunify families. Several, including Connecticut, have joined a network called the Quality Parenting Initiative.

The initiative, a program of the Youth Law Center, promotes quality parenting for children in child welfare and foster care services. It encourages foster and biological parents to interact.

In Connecticut, this means the interaction between the families begins with a phone call, Williams said. The call allows foster parents to ask biological parents about their children: what they like to eat, their favorite TV shows, or their favorite bedtime story. Some families also have “ice breakers,” or meetings, between foster and biological parents to talk about the best ways to parent the child in care.

“If we’re going to keep kids home and try to get kids back home as soon as we can through reunification, we want to give parents every chance to stay connected, to continue to parent their children, and to give them the resources they need,” Williams said.

Research suggests that well-planned, intentional contact with birth family members can improve the likelihood that children in foster care will get a permanent placement or reunify with their families.

In recent years, there have been growing calls from activists to abolish the current child welfare system. They say it’s more akin to policing than social services.

Many states, including Connecticut, have implemented measures such as the Quality Parenting Centers and other services to keep families together where possible. Newly appointed DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly has said keeping families together and preventing the removal of children where possible will be one of the focuses of her administration.

Learning to play

The Quality Parenting Center also includes a focus on teaching parents to play with their children in ways that are developmentally appropriate, Clayborne said.

Their staff have participated in a training with LEGO during which the company trained them and other Department of Children and Families in the most age-appropriate ways. LEGO has regularly provided training for DCF workers for many years, Williams said.

Cox says his oldest has started working on arts and crafts for him, recently a Trolls-themed poster with stickers of the cartoon characters dotted across different settings. The girls love being together, he said.

He plans to take them to Hershey Park for their birthdays later this month. Their birthdays are close, so he plans to combine the celebrations, he said.

“They really sparked something in me,” Cox said of his daughters. “It’s like I really feel love. That’s where my love comes from, is them. Nothing will ever compare to their love.”

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