PHILOSOPHY

Children with severe emotional disturbance very often are removed from their environments and placed in psychiatric hospitals or residential facilities outside of their familiar surroundings.  They lose their family, school, neighborhood friends and all else that provides children with a sense of cultural identity and emotional stability.

Bonding Links offers children with emotional difficulties an opportunity to live in a therapeutic family setting within their community. Thus, the children maintain connections to components of their environment, including their biological family, which are crucial to their emotional and cultural development.  The ultimate goals of the program are the prevention of institutionalization and family reunification.

THE PROGRAM

Bonding Links services are provided to children between the ages of 5-17 who are seriously emotionally disturbed.

Bonding Links provides children who cannot remain with their natural families an opportunity to work on their difficulties in a therapeutic family setting within their community.

Children are placed with trained Professional Parents, who along with a staff Family Specialist, develop a home atmosphere of warmth, nurturance, acceptance, as well as consistency and structure.

Combined with individualized placement in a therapeutic home environment there is ongoing contact between the child, natural family, school and other neighborhood systems which impact on the child's life