Providing a Brief Parenting Intervention to Families in Reunification

• In Event: What do parents want? Results-based interventions to promote family engagement and positive parent-child outcomes

Abstract

Introduction:
By law, children are entitled to regular visits with their parents if it is in their best interest (UN General Assembly, 1989), and some research has shown a strong connection between parent visits and successful reunification (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2011). More specifically, parenting skills and participation in therapeutic services was found to differentiate between failed and successful reunifications (Miller et al., 2006).

Mental health services are available to children in foster care. However, young children exposed to trauma may not receive services without obvious symptoms, and services targeted at the child most often include the resource caregiver rather than the biological parent. Additionally, birth parents are often reluctant to seek help for difficult visits, for fear that it will reflect poorly upon their parenting or extend the child’s time in care. Resource caregivers also receive limited support for navigating the biological parent-resource parent relationship (Nesmith, 2013) and may struggle with helping children cope with conflicted feelings and difficult visit interactions (Chateauneuf et al., 2018).

Method:
As a strategy for addressing these deficits, we began to offer an adaptation of a brief (7-session) PC-CARE intervention to all biological parents of children aged 1-13 years in reunification as a prevention service to support good quality visits. We report here on challenges and outcomes of the first 6 months of service provision in which 48 children were referred and 32 children received PC-CARE services: 8 completed PC-CARE and 24 were currently in treatment (6 were waiting to begin services). In addition to PC-CARE services, we provided families the services of a family navigator. This family navigator helped connect parents with community resources and services. She provided services to 10 children, preventing eviction for one family and obtaining a housing voucher for another (who was ultimately housed).

We examined changes in these biological parents’ use of positive parenting skills over the course of treatment and found significant improvements skills over this time, increasing positive skills and decreasing undesired statements. As expected, results of analyses of biological parents’ perceptions of children’s behavioral issues showed that approximately a third of children received highly positive ratings each session, which greatly reduced our ability to detect change in the sample. In spite of this “ceiling effect,” we observed a non-significant trend for improved behavior.

Discussion
Initial findings related to short-term outcomes give some encouragement about the value of offering this preventive parenting intervention to reunifying parents. However, experiences in the first 6 months of providing these services have also revealed challenges. These challenges fell into general categories related to logistical difficulties (e.g., families of sibling sets of up to 5 children from different resource family homes), system structure issues (e.g., supervision staff training, social worker workload, communication between social workers and parents), difficulties of system navigation for parents in efforts to keep from falling through the safety net, and the high degree of vulnerability of parents (e.g., lack of resources, continued substance use).

Author

• Susan Goff Timmer, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author