Foster Parent Training Goes High Tech

New Study in Child Welfare Finds Improved Retention During Foster Parent Training

March 22, 2017

Eugene, OR — A common problem for social work agencies throughout the United States is an insufficient number of adequately trained foster families available to provide care for the over 400,000 children in need. A research study in Child Welfare reports on a promising innovative curriculum which may help increase the number of trained foster parents. The research study compared the efficacy of a traditional classroom-only training program and a training curriculum which blends online interactive courses with classroom meetings.

Adequate preparation of foster parents requires up to 30 hours of training, traditionally given during in-person meetings. Agencies using this classroom-only approach typically face high attrition rates, due to such factors as the inconvenience and costs for parents to arrange child care, time off work, and travel.

Currently, to meet the need for new foster families, many states and agencies are forced to compromise their training systems through condensed courses or marathon weekend trainings. Without in-depth training, new foster parents often have difficulty understanding and dealing with the special needs and behavior problems of children who have experienced trauma. Inadequate foster parent training is one of the major causes of children experiencing disruption in care, resulting in multiple placements and thus creating additional trauma in the children's lives.

The new blended curriculum for prospective foster parents, as developed by FosterParentCollege.com, combines 10 online interactive courses with 4 in-person meetings. The research study found that the blended curriculum significantly lowered dropout rates of adults preparing to become foster parents. Additionally, at the 3-month follow-up, the parents in the blended curriculum had retained more knowledge of the presented information than parents in the traditional classroom-only training. While both study groups made significant gains in awareness of parenting issues, those gains were greater for the classroom-only approach.

“While the overall project was designed to provide high-quality training to potential foster parents, the real goal is to improve the lives of children,” said Lee White, the article's lead author. “States and agencies that have adequate numbers of well-trained foster parents will reduce disruptions and provide children with an improved experience while in care.”

Conducted in Portland, Oregon with the cooperation of the Oregon Department of Human Services, the research study used a pre-post design with a 3-month follow-up. Participants included 111 prospective foster, adoptive, and kinship parents, 57 of whom were assigned to the treatment group and received the Blended Preservice Training. The other 54 study participants were assigned to the comparison group and received the classroom-only training used by the state of Oregon (Foundations in Fostering, Adopting, or Caring for Relative Children Training), which consists of eight 3-hour in-person meetings.

Development of the blended curriculum was funded through a 5-year Small Business Innovation Research grant (Award R44HD054032) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health to Northwest Media, parent company of FosterParentCollge.com.

The article, "Efficacy of Blended Preservice Training for Resource Parents," was coauthored by Lee White, Richard Delaney, Caesar Pacifici, Carol Nelson, Josh Whitkin, Maureen Lovejoy, and Betsy Keefer Smalley. It appears in Child Welfare, Vol. 93(6), pp. 45-72.

For more information about this article, states and agencies that have implemented the Foster Parent College blended training, and testimonial quotes from foster parents, please contact Liz Brooks at Liz@Northwestmedia.com or 800-777-6636.