After 116 years of providing a home and school to children – first as an orphanage, then as a residential treatment home – it’s over.

Change happened. But that’s OK. There were good reasons to close, and they weren’t all about money. Besides, U.P. KIDS still provides temporary homes to children through foster care while their families do the necessary work to bring the family back together, and permanent adoptive homes when reunification isn’t possible.

But the real change hasn’t happened yet. Not just with U.P. KIDS, but with all providers and funders of the care and support of families, and systems responsible for the safety of children.

What needs to change is when and for how long we work with families. The vast amount of resources spent on helping children and families is “down river” – after a family has had a child removed or the child has nine toes out the door. Once a family is at this point, the costs are high (around $27,375 for a year of foster care or $73,000 a year for residential treatment), can last several years or more and too often escalate to incarceration when the child is a young adult.

The real problem is that the trauma (poverty, violence, abuse, neglect, etc.) and the associated stress on a child usually began early in his or her life. Yet often the trauma being inflicted on a child isn’t noticed until entering school or later.

Then there’s the investigative period and legalities that can extend the time before action is taken to keep the child safe. It can easily be six or seven years after the trauma began before a child is removed from a toxic situation. Then begins the child’s trauma of removal from home, followed by the fear of never returning home. For many, that’s a fear that’s realized.

Experiencing trauma and stress disrupts brain development and impairs long-term health, impedes learning and in later life is associated with unhealthy coping mechanisms (alcohol and drug abuse) and diminished mental health well-being.

Here’s the worst part: Even with the years of trauma and stunted brain development and increased mental health issues that could last a lifetime, another tragedy is that of the cycle of poverty, neglect and violence. It will be passed on and passed again, unless it’s broken.

We need to move “up river” and identify children (and pre-natal parents) at-risk before the damage is done, or at least early on. Services need to be multi-faceted to address an array of issues with the whole family, which are intensive because of the complexity in creating plans to brake intergenerational cycles, long term to overcome barriers, collaborative with many partners and well-funded.

The need to address children’s health before birth through age 5 is well-researched and documented, and it has taken hold. An example is the Great Start Initiative.

But more needs to be done, and more intensely for longer periods of time.

To break chronic unhealthy family cycles could take a half-generation of intensive services and caring for children. An “army” of social workers, mentors, educators, job coaches and family supporters who become surrogate brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and family friends who provide a different way to look at and do things. This army can provide values and skills through opportunity and caring relationships.

What is the alternative? To continue year after year, decade after decade spending tens of billions of dollars every year on “late intervention,” only to have the cycles start again and again with each new child?

We can change this. Ten years of community and political will, along with money(yes, we have it -it’s just a matter of priority) can significantly break this attack on each new generation of children and save bundles of cash in the future.

Healthy children become healthy adults. Healthy adults raise healthy children. This is the cycle all children deserve.

Mark Lambert is the executive director for U.P. KIDS.