About this Recovery House
Madre House 1 is a women's recovery residence in Milford, Delaware, in Sussex County. It carries eight certified beds and is the largest of the three Madre Houses that Psychotherapeutic Services operates for women in recovery and their children.
A Sober Living Home That Takes Women With Children
The Madre Houses accept mothers with young children living alongside them, up to the age of twelve. That is the scarcest kind of recovery housing anywhere in the country. A woman leaving treatment is normally asked to choose between taking a bed and keeping her children with her, and the usual result is that she takes neither. A certified residence that holds both removes the choice, and with it one of the most common reasons women leave treatment early. Across the three houses the program is set up for twenty women together with their children.
Eight Beds and Round the Clock Staffing
This house carries eight of those beds. Psychotherapeutic Services staffs the Madre program continuously, every day of the year, which is a heavier model than most recovery housing runs. Residents receive case management, help finding work, coping skills work, exposure to twelve step meetings in the community, and access to a psychiatric nurse practitioner for mental health care and medication management. Residents are expected to engage with outpatient treatment while they live here.
Where the Madre Recovery Homes Sit in Milford
The operator publishes the three Madre Houses as neighboring addresses on South Washington Street in Milford, and settles which house a resident enters at placement. Milford straddles the Kent and Sussex line on the Mispillion River, and this residence falls on the Sussex side. The city is the retail and medical center for the middle of the Delmarva Peninsula. Bayhealth's Sussex campus hospital is in the town, the downtown and riverwalk sit within walking distance of the older residential blocks, and the US 113 and Route 1 corridors carry the poultry, food processing, warehouse and health care employers that much of central Delaware works for.
What Certification Adds for a Mother in Recovery
The residence is certified by the First State Alliance of Recovery Residences, the only body Delaware has approved to certify recovery housing. Certification binds a house to a code of ethics, to written disclosure of fees and rules before move in, to a written relapse and discharge policy, and to a complaint process outside the house. For a resident with children in the building, the discharge policy is the clause that matters most, because being asked to leave means moving a family. Certification puts those terms in writing before anyone signs.
Recovery Housing for Women in Sussex and Kent County
Central and southern Delaware has far less certified recovery housing than the Wilmington area, and family recovery housing is rarer still. A woman from Kent or Sussex County who needs to keep her children with her has very few certified options inside a reasonable distance, and Milford sits close to the geographic center of both. Delaware's Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health lists the Madre Houses among the state's publicly funded recovery housing for women with children, which matters for someone arriving without insurance or savings.
