Therapeutic Behavioral Services

Building Strong Families
Life with a child struggling with severe emotional and behavioral issues can become an overwhelming stress for the whole family, and jeopardize the child's ability to remain at home. Lincoln's Therapeutic Behavioral Services (TBS) teams work with the entire family in crisis to find solutions to ensure stability, and reduce and manage challenging behaviors through a variety of ways.

  • Comprehensive Assessment: Determining whether services are appropriate and deliverable, and assessing what's behind challenging behaviors.
  • Plan Development: Working together to develop an individualized plan to modify target behaviors, achieve measurable goals, and sustain improvements and gains long term. 
  • Family Coaching: Utilizing evidence-based practices, teaching, and modeling with kids and families to learn new behaviors and coping skills.
  • Coordination of Care: Collaborating with primary mental health providers, school personnel, and others to strengthen stability and permanence. 

Keeping Children at Home
Lincoln knows that to ensure success and stability, the entire family must be involved in finding solutions for reducing and managing challenging behaviors long-term. With Lincoln's TBS, children, youth, parents, caregivers, foster parents, group home staff, and school personnel learn strategies and skills to increase the kinds of behaviors for kids to succeed and stay at home. 

A Proven Model
Masters-level TBS clinicians work together with children and families to utilize their strengths and cultural experiences to drive their own individualized plan for success. The Lincoln team goes where children and families are to introduce, monitor, and reinforce strategies in the home, at school, and in the community. From parent consultation and group work to social skills education and training, our unique program sees great progress over a very short period of time. 

Services
The intensity and length of services is guided by the needs of each child, with no limitations. Our TBS clinicians work with a child, at all times everyday and across all living environments—including family and foster homes, community sites, school sites and residential treatment facilities. Services also include:

  • Thirty-day assessment period to determine if services are appropriate and deliverable
  • Delivery in locations where children experience the greatest problems
  • Transition plan to sustain improvements and gains

Who Can Receive TBS?
Children and youth under age 21 who have serious emotional challenges and who are beneficiaries of full-scope Medi-Cal. In addition, to qualify, a child must be at risk of placement in a RCL 12 or higher group home or psychiatric hospital, or have a history of psychiatric hospitalization within the past 24 months, or be in an RCL 12 (or higher) group home and need services to prevent placement failure.

Referrals
Because TBS services are an adjunct service to support current treatment, children must be referred for TBS in Alameda County by their mental health clinician. Parents, caregivers, foster parents, CASAs, social workers, probation officers and mental health providers can ask for TBS services from the child’s mental health clinician.