Competency Guidelines for Family Collaboration in Behavioral Health Services for Adolescents

Although structural strategic family therapy (FT) is an evidence-based approach for adolescent behavior problems, manualized family therapy models have not been widely adopted in usual care due to the training and implementation resources required. This article presents a competency framework for utilizing family collaboration with adolescent cases. It begins by discussing challenges to implementing FT in routine care and presents the core elements strategy, then introduces three “branches” that together constitute a continuum of family involvement—family collaboration, family skills training, and systemic family therapy—and describes the rationale and procedures for focusing on competency guidelines for family collaboration specifically. It then describes the basic techniques and competency guidelines for six core elements of family collaboration: family systems outreach, adolescent ecosystem, location of self, goal setting, family participation, caregiver consultation, family session management. It concludes by discussing future directions for this framework and the development of additional competencies for the other branches. While further research is necessary to test the efficacy of the treatment branches and accompanying competency standards, this article presents an innovative approach to involving family members in care that includes accessible competency guidelines.