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Effective: 9/2/2026

C1.1 Overview of Prevention and Wellbeing

Legal Authority

Introduction

​​​​The agency provides services, either directly or through collaboration with community partners, aimed at preventing child maltreatment and promoting child, family, and community well-being. 


Practice Guidance

  • To prevent maltreatment, it is necessary to strengthen the ability of communities to support children and families so that children can thrive at home. Rather than being incident-focused, prevention efforts must be holistic and examine the broader child, family, and community characteristics and experiences that support well-being. In short, maltreatment does not occur in isolation within a family, but within the context of community and societal factors that either positively or negatively impact child and family well-being.  These factors may include the following:
    • Economic stability or prevalence of poverty; 
    • Access to quality education and job opportunities; 
    • Availability of safe and affordable housing; 
    • Transportation, safe neighborhoods, and environment; 
    • Prevalence of racism, discrimination, and violence; 
    • Access to healthy foods and physical activity; 
    • Access to high-quality​ child care; and 
    • Access to health care, including behavioral health and substance use treatment when needed.   
  • In addition to these community and societal factors, protective factors within families also promote well-being, reducing the likelihood of maltreatment. These protective factors include:
    • Parental resilience;
    • Social connections;
    • Knowledge of parenting and child development;
    • Social and emotional competence of children; and 
    • Concrete supports.  
  • More detailed information on protective factors and how to apply them to work with families can be found in SOP C3.10 Strengthening Families. 
  • Improving or ensuring child and family well-being by strengthening families in their communities is the best upstream approach to prevention before problems occur or escalate. However, prevention efforts also include programs and initiatives to prevent repeat maltreatment or prevent entry into care if an incident of maltreatment has already happened. 
  • Prevention and well-being efforts can occur on three different levels, and the most effective and well-balanced approach considers what is necessary to target all three.

    • Primary prevention efforts ensure families have access to needed resources and support within their community. These are typically resources and supports that benefit all families and are readily available to families in a thriving community. Examples might include public awareness campaigns about positive parenting, access to affordable high-quality child care, home visiting programs for new parents (e.g., Health Access Nurturing Development Services (HANDS)), access to pediatric care, and opportunities for family income.  
    • Secondary prevention efforts create opportunities or meet the specific needs of families with particular circumstances, challenges, or needs.  These services are targeted to address specific family needs and are shown to lower the prevalence of child maltreatment in communities.  These services may include parenting education and supports for teen parents, early intervention services, respite for families of children with special needs, or concrete supports for families living in poverty.
    • Tertiary prevention services are provided to families in which child maltreatment has already occurred with the goal of preventing recurrence and entry into care, as well as facilitating reunification of children in care. Some examples of tertiary prevention services in Kentucky include the Family Preservation and Reunification Services (FPRS), Kentucky Strengthening Ties and Empowering Parents (KSTEP), and Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START). 
  • Some services may not fall neatly into one of the three (3) levels of prevention and could be intended to promote well-being at more than one (1) level.  Additionally, often the timing or reason a service or support is offered may determine which level of prevention is being targeted.
  • In addition to ensuring an array of services and supports that encompass all three (3) levels of prevention, it is also important to consider barriers or deterrents to family engagement in services. Professionals may reduce or remove barriers to services in the following ways: 
    • Consider cultural or historical factors that may make the family uncomfortable with receiving services; 
    • Work to remove stigma or fear that may negatively impact engagement;
    • Utilize strength-based and trauma-informed approaches; 
    • Avoid punitive or compliance-driven approaches;
    • Ensure services are family and youth driven. 
  • It is the ethical responsibility of all staff to work toward ensuring families have access to supports and services within communities to promote well-being and reduce the need for child welfare intervention.  




Procedure

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Division of Prevention and Community Wellbeing (DPCW) Staff:
  1. Consider determinants of health and wellbeing to identify gaps in services and supports in communities;
  2. Collaborate with other child and family-serving agencies and systems to build robust community service arrays that support well-being;
  3. Incorporate voices of lived experience in the identification of family and community needs and in planning systems of care that are youth and family-driven.
The SSW:
  1. Collaborates with other child and family serving agencies at the community level to build robust community service arrays that support wellbeing. This may include participating with regional networks, regional prevention collaboratives​, regional interagency councils, prevention events, or other multi-disciplinary teams;
  2. Considers protective factors described in SOP C3.10 Strengthening Families​ when working with families utilizing this framework to identify opportunities for support; 
  3. Identifies families’ barriers to meaningful participation in services and works in partnership with families and providers to overcome these;
  4. Refers families to strength-based and trauma-informed services whenever possible;
  5. Communicates systems-level needs and gaps in services to DPCW.  




Documents

Revisions

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