Therapeutic intervention
Children in the child welfare system have often experienced significant and repeated traumas and having a background in foster homes—especially in instances of sexual abuse—can be the precipitating factor in a wide variety of psychological and cognitive deficits it may also serve to obfuscate the true cause of underlying issues. The foster care experience may have nothing to do with the symptoms, or on the other hand, a disorder may be exacerbated by having a history of foster care and attendant abuses. The human brain however has been shown to have a fair degree of neuroplasticity. and adult neurogenesis has been shown to be an ongoing process.Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC), also referred to as Treatment Foster Care Oregon (TFCO) and Treatment Foster Care (TFC) is a community-based intervention that was created in 1983 by Dr. Patricia Chamberlain and her associated colleagues with the initial design intended to offer a replacement for group facilities. MTFC has differing approaches for different age groups. Preschoolers receive “a behavior-management approach and intensively trains, supervises, and supports foster caregivers to provide positive adult support and consistent limit setting” coupled with “coordinated interventions with the child’s biological parents.” MTFC for adolescence consists of individual placement with an intensely trained foster family providing “coordinated interventions in the home, with peers, [and] in educational settings.” MTFC has been shown to provide better results than group facilities and proves to be more cost effective.
Reports show that Multidimensional treatment has effective results in reducing depression, arrest rates, deviant peer affiliations, placement disruption, and pregnancy rates while having positive replication trials. It is one method that attempts to incorporate trauma- and violence-informed care into its design.Researchers have faced difficulty when it comes to accurately assessing what makes MTFC and other similar programs that involve multiple levels of intervention successful. It seems to remain in a "black box"  scenario where it is unsure what aspect of the treatment plan is actually producing positive effects. Multiple peer-reviewed research articles on foster care programs point out a lack of research effectively evaluating the outcomes of specific foster care programs, calling for more complete assessments to be conducted  in order to properly compare outcomes between treatment plans and evaluate what practices in MTFC are most effective. Ethical concerns have also been raised by Therese Åström and other associated researchers when conducting a systematic review on behalf of the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services in 2018, noting that on the one hand MTFC is evaluated as effective, however, it tends to be implemented in a way that diminishes the childs agency. Cross-cultural adoption policies
George Shanti, Nico Van Oudenhoven, and Ekha Wazir, co-authors of Foster Care Beyond the Crossroads: Lessons from an International Comparative Analysis, say that there are four types of Government foster care systems. The first one is that of developing countries.