For the vast majority of children who enter Florida's foster care system, the goal is family-based placement — a foster home, a kinship placement with a relative, or an adoptive family. The research on child development is unambiguous on this point: children thrive best in family settings that provide individual attention, consistent relationships, and the normative developmental experiences that group care cannot replicate. Family-based care is the gold standard, and Florida's child welfare system is organized around it.
But for some children — those whose trauma histories are so severe, whose behavioral and emotional needs are so complex, or whose safety requires a level of supervision and therapeutic intensity that family-based care cannot provide — therapeutic residential care is the appropriate level of intervention. Not as a permanent solution, and not as a placement of last resort, but as a specialized therapeutic environment where healing can begin, stability can be established, and the groundwork can be laid for a successful transition to a less restrictive setting.
Understanding what therapeutic residential care is — and what distinguishes high-quality therapeutic residential care from the institutional care that the research rightly criticizes — is essential for families, caseworkers, judges, and advocates who are navigating placement decisions for children with complex needs.
Therapeutic residential care is a form of out-of-home placement in which children live in a structured, staffed residential setting and receive intensive therapeutic services as an integrated component of their daily care. The defining characteristic that distinguishes therapeutic residential care from traditional group home care is the integration of the therapeutic component into the fabric of daily life. Therapy is not an add-on that happens in a separate office for one hour per week — it is woven into every meal, every conflict, every moment of connection and rupture that constitutes the child's daily experience.
In a high-quality therapeutic residential program, the residential staff are not simply caregivers who maintain safety and provide basic needs. They are trained therapeutic practitioners who implement a structured behavioral and relational curriculum in the context of daily living, who understand the trauma histories of the children in their care, and who are supervised and supported by licensed mental health professionals. The licensed clinicians who provide individual and group therapy are not external contractors who visit the campus periodically — they are members of an integrated clinical team that includes the residential staff, the case managers, the educators, and the pastoral care providers.
The goal of therapeutic residential care is never long-term institutionalization. It is stabilization, healing, and transition — the achievement of specific therapeutic goals that will enable the child to move to a less restrictive setting, whether that is a foster home, a kinship placement, or reunification with their family of origin.
Residing Hope's therapeutic residential care program on the Enterprise campus is built on the Teaching Family Model — one of the most rigorously researched and widely replicated models in residential child care. Developed at the University of Kansas Achievement Place program in the late 1960s by Drs. Elery Phillips, Montrose Wolf, Dean Fixsen, and Gary Timbers, the Teaching Family Model has been implemented in hundreds of residential programs across the United States and internationally and has been the subject of more than five decades of outcome research.
The Teaching Family Model is built on a deceptively simple premise: that the most powerful therapeutic force in a child's life is not a weekly therapy session, but the quality of the relationships they experience in their daily environment. The model's central innovation is the "teaching family" — a married couple (or in some implementations, a single professional) who live in the residential cottage with the children, providing the consistent, caring, therapeutically intentional relationships that are the foundation of healing.
Teaching parents in the Teaching Family Model are not simply caregivers — they are trained therapeutic practitioners who implement a structured behavioral and relational curriculum in the context of daily life. They teach social skills, emotional regulation, problem-solving, and self-advocacy through the natural interactions of daily living — at the dinner table, during homework time, in the midst of conflict, and in the quiet moments before bed. They are trained, supervised, and evaluated on their ability to build therapeutic relationships with the children in their care, and they receive ongoing coaching and support from the program's clinical team.
The Teaching Family Model's emphasis on relationship as the primary therapeutic medium is particularly well-suited to children who have experienced trauma in the context of caregiving relationships — which describes most of the children served by therapeutic residential care programs. For these children, the experience of a consistent, caring adult who remains present through behavioral storms, who sets limits with warmth rather than harshness, and who communicates genuine belief in the child's capacity for growth can be genuinely transformative. It is not therapy in the conventional sense — it is something more fundamental: the experience of being in relationship with an adult who will not abandon you, no matter what you do.
The Enterprise campus of Residing Hope is located at 51 Children's Way in Enterprise, Florida — a small community in Volusia County, situated among the Spanish moss oak trees of Central Florida near the St. Johns River. The campus has been a place of healing for Florida children since 1908, and the physical environment reflects more than a century of intentional investment in the wellbeing of children.
The residential cottages on the campus are designed to function as family units. Each cottage houses a small group of children — typically six to eight — with teaching parents who live in the cottage alongside them. Meals are prepared and eaten together. Chores are shared. Birthdays are celebrated. The rhythms of daily life — waking, eating, learning, playing, resting — are structured but not regimented, and they are designed to provide the predictability and consistency that traumatized children need without the rigidity that would make the environment feel punitive.
The campus includes open green spaces, a swimming pool, community gardens, a chapel, and a Montessori school that serves both campus residents and children from the surrounding community. Children in the residential program attend school on campus or in the local community, participate in recreational activities, and have access to spiritual life programming including chapel services and pastoral care from the campus chaplain. The integration of spiritual life into the residential program is not incidental — it reflects Residing Hope's conviction that healing is holistic, that the spiritual dimension of a child's experience is as important as the psychological and physical dimensions, and that the love of God is a healing force that no clinical intervention can replicate.
Licensed therapists provide individual therapy to each child on a weekly basis, with additional sessions as clinically indicated. Group therapy is provided for children who are developmentally and clinically appropriate for group work. Family therapy is a core component of the treatment model, with the goal of maintaining and strengthening the child's connections to their family of origin and preparing for reunification or transition to a family-based placement.
Therapeutic residential care at Residing Hope is grounded in a trauma-informed approach that shapes every aspect of the program — from the physical environment to the language used by staff to the way behavioral challenges are understood and addressed. Trauma-informed care is not a specific intervention — it is a framework for understanding behavior through the lens of trauma history and responding in ways that promote safety, trust, and healing rather than retraumatization.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines trauma-informed care through six key principles: safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment and choice, and cultural, historical, and gender sensitivity. Each of these principles is operationalized in Residing Hope's residential program through specific policies, practices, and staff training requirements.
In a trauma-informed residential program, a child who becomes aggressive during a routine transition is not simply a behavioral problem to be managed — they are a child whose nervous system has been conditioned by experience to perceive transitions as threatening, and whose aggressive behavior is a survival response rather than a willful choice. The appropriate response is not punishment but co-regulation — the teaching parent's calm, consistent presence helping the child's dysregulated nervous system return to a state of safety. This does not mean that there are no consequences for behavior. Clear, consistent, fair consequences are an essential component of the Teaching Family Model and of any effective therapeutic milieu. But consequences in a trauma-informed program are delivered with warmth, explanation, and a focus on skill-building — and they are always accompanied by the message that the child is valued, that their behavior does not define them, and that the adults in their lives believe in their capacity to grow.
Residing Hope's therapeutic residential care program holds accreditation from the EAGLE Accreditation Commission, the Florida Department of Children and Families, and the Council on Accreditation (COA). These accreditations require the program to meet rigorous standards for clinical quality, staff training and supervision, safety, and outcome measurement, and to undergo regular external review to maintain accreditation status.
The Council on Accreditation is one of the two primary accrediting bodies for child welfare and behavioral health organizations in the United States, alongside the Joint Commission. COA accreditation requires compliance with more than 350 standards across all aspects of organizational and program performance, and it is recognized by the Florida Department of Children and Families as evidence of program quality. Residing Hope's COA accreditation is renewed through a rigorous multi-year review process that includes a comprehensive self-study, an on-site review by trained COA peer reviewers, and ongoing compliance monitoring.
The program is also a member of the Teaching Family Association, the national professional organization for programs implementing the Teaching Family Model, which provides ongoing training, consultation, and peer review to member programs. Residing Hope's clinical and residential staff participate in regular training and professional development, and the program maintains a robust quality assurance process that includes regular review of individual child outcomes, staff performance evaluations, and program-level data analysis.
Therapeutic residential care is indicated when a child's needs cannot be safely and effectively met in a family-based setting. This may be the case when a child presents with severe behavioral challenges that have disrupted multiple foster placements, when a child's trauma history is so complex that they require a level of therapeutic intensity and clinical supervision that family-based care cannot provide, or when a child's safety — or the safety of others in a family setting — requires a structured, staffed environment.
Referrals to Residing Hope's therapeutic residential care program are accepted from the Florida Department of Children and Families, community-based care lead agencies, and private sources. The clinical team conducts thorough assessments to ensure that each child placed in the program is an appropriate candidate for residential care and that the program's therapeutic environment is the right fit for their specific needs.
To inquire about placement, contact Residing Hope at [email protected] or 386-668-4774. The clinical team is available to discuss your child's needs, answer questions about the program, and guide you through the referral process. For children in Florida who need more than a family placement can provide, the Enterprise campus offers something rare: a community of adults who have chosen, as a vocation, to be present with children in their most difficult moments — and who believe, without reservation, that every child is worth that presence.
Residing Hope has served Florida children and families since 1908 through evidence-based, trauma-informed care rooted in the love of Christ.