By bringing everyone to the table, family courts can break cycles of trauma and meet families’ needs.
The challenges that bring people into family court are complex and interconnected. Underlying many family court cases are deep-rooted issues like poverty, housing insecurity, mental health, and intergenerational trauma.
These issues are best met with support and care in the community, yet the typical court process too often leads to cycles of even more harm and involvement in the justice system. By working hand in hand with communities and investing in their well-being, our family courts can do better for children and families.
The population of children most likely to be involved in the child welfare system is also the youngest: those aged three and younger. At this critical stage of brain development, children in family court are especially vulnerable to maltreatment and separation from a caregiver—both of which can have lasting effects on a child’s health and well-being.
With careful collaboration and planning, there are ways to reorient the court process to address families’ underlying needs. Taking a trauma-informed approach in family court can help foster healthier attachments between children and their parents and prevent future contact with the system—ensuring people can be safely supported in their communities instead.
Over the last decade, we’ve worked to bring a focus on infant mental health into family courts across New York to strengthen relationships between parents and their babies, break cycles of trauma, and center children’s developmental needs through targeted community-based services. We’ve also provided support to parents struggling to meet requirements like child support, connecting them to services in employment, education, and housing as an alternative to punitive responses that often make it harder to be there for their children.
That same problem-solving approach drives our work with teenagers and young adults in family court, who are also at a vulnerable stage of brain development. We bring adolescent mental health expertise into the court process to reduce the harms of the justice system, support young people’s education and career goals, promote stability, and offer restorative alternatives to detention for those who have been arrested for a crime. All of these interventions help young people reimagine their futures and build positive support networks in their own communities.
Addressing the needs that so often bring people into family court takes collaboration between many different groups and agencies, in both government and communities. Last year, we partnered with New York’s court system and the Governor’s Office to help launch the Family Justice Initiative, a statewide effort to reimagine family court in a way that works better for kids and families. Guided by the insights of people who work in and have been impacted by the system, the Initiative is bringing courts and communities together to improve the lives of all New Yorkers.
That collaborative approach springs from a vision called Community Justice. It works by bringing everyone—judges, lawyers, and court staff; service providers and mental health professionals; families, communities, and people involved in the legal system—together to address underlying problems. Instead of focusing on punishing past wrongs, Community Justice looks ahead, asking what we can do now to build a better future. Family courts have a vital role to play in that work, starting at the foundation of thriving communities—safe, strong families.