Whenever possible, residential programs for children engage families as full and equal partners, while child welfare agencies strive to support, preserve, and reunify families. Children who enter residential care have typically been in many other placements; their histories often include disrupted adoptions, abuse, and repeated school failure. Progressive residential care agencies provide crisis care and respite for families of special-needs children, stabilize crises and work with the family in the community to maintain and build on gains, and reach into neighborhoods to provide parenting education and to prepare children, biological parents, and adoptive parents for prospective adoption.