Home Based Family Centered (HBFC) services give primary responsibility for evaluation, service planning, and counseling to the direct service in-home family therapist. In the mental health center (MHC), the psychiatrist may see a child once in the office and make a diagnosis and recommendation for the child, and sometimes for the parents. Also in the MHC, the tendency has been to assign an in-home worker to lower socio-economic families, principally for purposes of gaining information and for encouraging the family to bring one of its children to the MHC offices. This reflects an historical preference for serving the individual in the office and the low priority given to serving the poor, hard to reach, hard core, chronic, and unmotivated. Often mental health centers are clinically, administratively, and sometimes geographically divided into child, adolescent, and adult divisions. From a family systems perspective this is not useful. Interactional processes as a part of the treatment program are sacrificed. The psychiatric, medical influence of the mental health center emphasizes pathology or dysfunction. The HBFC therapist is looking for competence and how to elicit and enhance what strengths a parent, child, or family has to solve their own problems. These issues point to a need for HBFC services to continue to serve as separate, distinct, and clearly defined approaches to prevention and remediation in work with families. (LLL)