Beyond Deficit: Positive Parenting Among Families In Intact Services

Background & Purpose: Families involved in child welfare are expected to maintain child safety while navigating a range of stressors. However, research on child welfare-impacted families has often focused on deficits, behavior problems, and system outcomes such as re-entry or removal (Connell et al., 2013; Opoku et al., 2025), with less attention to the positive parenting practices that caregivers engage in. This framing can obscure how caregivers work to provide consistency, connection, and safety for their children in day-to-day life. Although these families often face instability, little is known about how caregivers themselves describe their parenting approach, intent, and behaviors under such conditions. Drawing on survey data and in-depth interviews, this study examines caregivers’ accounts of their parenting practices and the challenges that shape them.

Methods: This mixed-methods study drew on baseline survey data from 315 caregivers receiving Intact Families Services, a child welfare-funded post-investigation case management program run by community agencies, and enrolled in Empowering Parents with Resources (EmPwR) and 92 qualitative interviews conducted at baseline and 6-month follow-up. Survey measures used were parent-child interactions, work-childcare stress, and household chaos; descriptive statistics were used to characterize reported stressors, home environment, and parent-child interactions. Interviews explored caregiving practices and perceived impact of structural constraints on parenting. Qualitative data were analyzed through a flexible coding process using deductive codes and content analysis to identify patterns across caregiver accounts. Integrated findings were used to examine how parents practiced positive parenting under everyday constraints.

Results: Survey findings suggest substantial caregiver engagement in positive parent-child interactions across developmental stages. Caregivers reported frequent age-appropriate interaction with children, averaging 5.2 days per week with infants, 5.1 with toddlers, and 4.9 with school-age children. Interaction levels also remained relatively high among preteens and teens at 3.9 and 4, respectively. Caregivers reported relatively low household chaos overall (M=1.94 on a 0-15 scale). At the same time, caregivers reported moderate work-childcare stress (M=2.42 on a 1-4 scale) and broader material strain, with 52.9% reported being unable to pay the full cost of rent or mortgage at least once in the past year. Across interviews, caregivers described actively buffering children from financial and emotional stress by striving to maintain a sense of normalcy at home despite ongoing uncertainty. Together, findings suggest that positive parenting was common in this sample, although caregivers operated under conditions of instability and lack of support.

Conclusions & Implications: Findings suggest that parenting in Intact families should not be understood primarily through deficit-oriented frameworks. Caregivers described consistent efforts to create stability, routine, and emotional safety for their children despite ongoing work-childcare stress, household disruption, and material hardship. When family outcomes fall short of expectations, the gap may reflect not an absence of positive parenting actions, intentions, and attitudes, but the constant strains that affect parents’ ability to sustain them. Child welfare assessments and interventions should better recognize caregivers’ existing strengths while addressing the structural barriers that impede consistent positive parenting.