Quality visits are a fundamental component of effective child welfare practice. These visits serve as a critical opportunity to build trust, assess the child's safety and well-being, and foster positive relationships between you and caregivers, children, and youth. Engaging families in meaningful and consistent visits leads to a better understanding of the family's needs, strengths, and challenges — which in turn informs tailored interventions around safety and case planning.
Safety Organized Practice (SOP) tools play a crucial role in empowering workers to enhance the quality of visits. Integrating these tools into visits helps facilitate better communication and engagement with families by promoting trust, transparency, and clarity about safety concerns and intervention strategies.
To make visits more effective, use your critical thinking to identify a goal or two for the visit. Consider asking yourself these questions beforehand:
- How will I know if this visit is successful?
- What is needed to move the case forward?
- How does this visit align with the child/youth and/or family's priorities and concerns?
- Who do I need to talk with to effectively address the topic? Do I just need to check in with the child or youth, or are there others whose input would be helpful?
Once you have identified a goal for the visit and considered these questions, you can decide which SOP tools may be most useful (NCDHHS, 2023a).
As discussed in the article "Safety Organized Practice and North Carolina's Practice Model," there are a variety of SOP tools. Let us consider a few of these tools and how they can be used to enhance the quality of visits.
Three-Column Mapping
"Caseworkers should ask these questions on every home visit and every time we meet with a caretaker, child, or collateral" (NCDHHS, 2025). For example, during a visit with a youth in care, if you asked the three questions, they might share the following:
Sometimes, youth don't feel comfortable talking to workers. This framework can be a helpful way for them to share their worries, strengths, and needs.
Solution-Focused Questions
Solution-focused questions can be helpful to use within the three-column mapping questions or when engaging with families on initial or follow-up visits. For example, on an initial visit with a biological mother who left marks and bruises on her child, an exception question might be: "Tell me about a time when your child wasn't minding you, and you didn't leave marks and bruises." This provides important information about whether the mother has other effective discipline methods.
Similarly, if you asked a scaling question on an initial visit — "On a scale of 1 to 10, how safe does your child feel living with you?" — and the child shared a 3, it would be important to ask this same question at each follow-up visit. The goal would be for that number to go up, indicating growing safety. If it were to go down, exploring what led to the lower number is critical information for assessment.
Scaling Willingness, Capacity, and Confidence
Scaling willingness, capacity, and confidence with resource parents or kinship caregivers can be a useful tool for gathering more detailed information about topics such as managing a child or youth's behavior. For example (NCDHHS, 2023b):
- "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being completely unwilling and 10 being completely willing, how willing are you to work with the child's behavior?"
- "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being completely incapable and 10 being completely capable, how capable do you feel managing the child's behavior?"
- "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not confident at all and 10 being completely confident, how confident are you that the child's behavior is going to improve with the technique we discussed today?"
The answers to these questions provide important information about whether the caregiver needs more support or strategies to manage a child or youth's behaviors.
Three Houses
The Three Houses tool can serve as a valuable visual and emotional aid to understand a child's perspective and concerns. For example, in a visit with a five-year-old who witnessed domestic violence, the child might respond in the following way:
These responses illustrate how a young child might process complex emotions. It is important for caregivers and workers to listen carefully and provide support that helps the child feel secure and understood.
Conclusion
Safety-organized practice tools serve as essential resources. They allow child welfare workers to respond promptly to safety concerns, build stronger relationships with families through transparent communication, and make informed decisions. They help workers conduct more effective, focused, and meaningful visits that ensure the caregiver and child/youth's voices are a part of planning — leading to better outcomes for children and families.
As one parent shared regarding how SOP fosters engagement: "I learned how to build a connection, build a relationship, and build that communication to where it's productive and positive and putting the children's needs first" (UC Davis).