Designing an evidence-based intervention for parents involved with child welfare

Laura Orlando, Susan Barkan and Kathryn Brennan

Children and Youth Services Review, 2019, vol. 105, issue C, -

Abstract: With over 400,000 children in foster care in the United States and parenting services being the most frequently ordered service to try to remediate parental deficiencies and to support reunification efforts, it is imperative that this service not only has a high relevance to the parents it is trying to reach, but has evidence to support effectiveness (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2018). However, most of the evidence-based parenting programs being offered to parents have neither high relevance to this population nor have they been rigorously studied. Additionally, they are costly to implement and attrition rates are of great concern. In this paper, we describe a process used to inform the development of a parenting intervention that would have high relevance to child welfare involved parents and could then work towards proving its effectiveness. The phases of this process were to: 1) conduct a scan of the literature on evidence-based parenting programs currently used in child welfare, 2) complete a series of stakeholder interviews with key informants to better understand needs and gaps in parenting support and services to child welfare involved families and, 3) convene a development team of relevant experts to inform the synthesis of knowledge gained from phases one and two in order to guide the development of program content and strategies to optimize effective program delivery. This study helped to identify that early parent-child visits are a critical and untapped opportunity for the placement of a parenting intervention. Initial parent-child visits are a powerful moment in the case in which early support and education can enhance parent engagement in the visitation process and potentially affect engagement in other needed services.

Keywords: Evidence-based; Foster care; Parenting; Supervised visits; Child welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:105:y:2019:i:c:20

DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104429

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