Generic foster parent training programs can make grandparents, aunts, uncles and others who take in children of their relatives feel like square pegs being pounded into round holes.
Nearly one-quarter of the nation’s 500,000 foster children live with relatives, according to a 2006 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report. But training designed for kinship caregivers has lagged in most jurisdictions – which is unfortunate, because the increasing use of kinship care cries out for special training.
A study released last month found that children in kinship care in Colorado had fewer out-of-home placements than other foster youth, and were seven times more likely to find a permanent placement. (See Report Roundup, page 30.)
Unlike traditional foster parents, who decide to take in children and are trained in advance of placements, kinship caregivers often fall into their role as foster parents rather suddenly, then receive training weeks or months later. “It was nothing they sought out,” says Shalonda Cawthon, vice president of Family and Children’s Services, a private foster care agency in Nashville, Tenn. “They just thought it was their responsibility, because they received a phone call in the middle of the night [that their] grandchild, niece, nephew might be taken into custody if they didn’t step up.”
Differences
The first problem: Many kinship foster parents often see the required training as unnecessary or even condescending, according to Training Kin to be Foster Parents: Best Practices from the Field, a report co-authored by Cawthon and published in July by ChildFocus, which helps youth agencies handle policy analysis, capacity building, program development, government and community relations, and strategic communications.
In states that haven’t tailored training for kinship caregivers, those caregivers “smile and listen, and they’re like, ‘OK, I know more about what these children have been through. Why is this being presented to me this way?’ ” says Sondra M. Jackson, executive director of Black Administrators in Child Welfare. “They’ll call me, and we’ll have long discussions about, ‘What in the world are these people trying to get me to do?’ ”
What’s more, the relationships that kinship foster parents have with the child’s parents can cause tension. While traditional foster parents can focus strictly on the child’s needs, a kinship caregiver may have divided loyalties, says the report by ChildFocus. To that end, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) encourages “family-centered assessments” that explore caregivers’ previous relationships with the parents and child and that define the roles and responsibilities of the kinship family.
What’s Needed
The ChildFocus report profiles agencies that have changed their training programs, shortening and adapting them for kinship caregivers. Revisions include “making it flexible in terms of the number of hours of formal training,” Cawthon says.
Support groups, which are common in standard foster parent training, can be particularly valuable when adapted for relatives.
Support groups are valuable, says Ernestine Jones, author of a recent white paper, simply titled Kinship Care, from Casey Family Programs. She says kinship caregivers involved in such support groups found that “their problems still existed, but because they were able to find ways to support and work with each other, they were not as bad.”
“Call it something other than training,” Cawthon says of the support groups.
Two widely used curricula for foster parent training are the Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting (MAPP) and Parenting Resources Information Development Education (PRIDE).
In its Standards for Excellence for Kinship Care Services, the CWLA cites several matters that should be addressed differently for kinship care. For example, child welfare agencies need to be sure that families know about and can get access to public benefits, including child support and federal programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid. In most states, kinship caregivers must be licensed to receive such benefits.
Jones, a social work professor at Howard University in Washington and management consultant for community-based organizations, notes that kinship families still need much of the same assistance as standard foster families to deal with such basic needs as supplies (such as beds and bed linens) to help with health care and respite care.
Casey Family Programs recommends the development of a separate set of licensing standards that recognize the unique dynamics of kinship care.
The Casey paper cites research showing that kinship care is at least as safe as foster care overall, that placements with relatives tend to be more stable and provide more continuity with community and culture, and that states often feel less pressured to make longer-term decisions about reunification when youths are living with relatives.
The program profiles that follow are from the only four states ChildFocus found that offer specialized training for kinship foster parents. However, only one of the states has any data to show the effects of specialized kinship training.
Contact: ChildFocus, (301) 589-0136, http://www.childfocuspartners.com; Casey Family Programs, (206) 282-7300, http://www.casey.org; CWLA, (703) 412-2400, http://www.cwla.org.
Freelance journalist Ed Finkel is based in Chicago. efinkel@youthtoday.org.
Louisiana Department of Social Services
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Karla Venkataraman |
Baton Rouge, La.
(225) 342-5204
http://dss.state.la.us
The Strategy: Reduce the usual 30-hour MAPP (Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting) curriculum, developed by the Child Welfare Institute, to 12 hours for kinship foster parents. Let local areas emphasize different aspects, making sure they include grieving, shifting roles from “spoiling” to parenting, and working with the child welfare system.
The state Department of Social Services is working with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to write a uniform statewide curriculum, according to Karla Venkataraman, section administrator for the department’s Home Development Program, which recruits, trains, certifies and handles retention and support services for foster families.
“We’re adding more specialized information,” she says. “Some of the stuff in MAPP wasn’t really catered toward relatives – putting boundaries up about the mother coming back into the home, knowing how to work with your relatives around protecting children. … We’re going to try to give more specialized training for relatives.”
Getting Started: Louisiana created a separate training track for kin more than five years ago, Venkataraman says. “We were having so many children placed with relatives. We felt that since the relatives were familiar with the children they were related to, they didn’t need to go through the entire 30-hour training process,” she says. “It was to make it easier for relatives who wanted to step up to the plate. A lot of relatives decided they couldn’t commit” to the 30-hour training schedule.
Putting It Together: The state pulled together a working group of Home Development staffers from the regional offices. One created the basic curriculum and others adapted it for their needs. As part of an ongoing redesign, a similar group is compiling best practices from the various regions to build a uniform statewide curriculum.
Also, Louisiana has streamlined its overall process for kinship and other foster care parents as a result of what it learned from focus groups of kinship parents.
“We used to say, ‘These are the requirements; let’s see if you’re interested,’ ” Venkataraman says. “Now, we have more of a conversation and ask what they would like to know. It’s more of an engaging conversation instead of a screening-out tool.”
Rather than offering orientation only in a group setting, orientation can now be completed over the phone or in the home. The time it takes has been cut in half, to about 1½ hours. The number of MAPP sessions has been condensed to seven from 10.
“We tried to work it out so it can be done in 90 days,” Venkataraman says of the certification process. “We fine-tuned everything we had. We added a lot of supportive services.”
Families Served: The state has 531 certified relatives out of about 2,200 total certified foster care homes.
Staff: No staffers work on the training full time; 70 are involved to one degree or another.
Money: Each of the state’s nine regions receives about $10,000 for certification training, which covers incidentals, snacks and supplies and an annual appreciation banquet. Salaries are covered as part of the department’s overall budget.
Idaho Department of Health and Welfare
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Couer d’Alene, Idaho
(208) 676-1186
http://www.icwpartnership.org
The Strategy: Train kinship foster parents with the same 27-hour program as other foster parents, but offer them three more hours of special kinship care training, using CWLA’s kinship training programs. Encourage existing kinship caregivers to take the special three hours of kinship training.
Kim Fordham, associate director of resource family planning for the department, says kinship caregivers had “particular issues that weren’t being addressed.” To create the special three hour-session, “We took the CWLA kinship curriculum, we went through that and picked out … the things that were really defining for the kinship parents.”
The topics in that session include loss and grief, role conflicts, visitation challenges, working with the child welfare system and planning for permanency.
“What we’re trying to do now is, go back and help orient some of the licensing workers around … why it is important for them to go through additional training,” Fordham says. “We have tried to help them understand that, even though these kinship folks know these kids, they don’t understand the experience of that child in their care. … They may not understand the concept of what those children are going through.”
Getting Started: The Idaho Child Welfare Center, part of the state agency, began training kinship caregivers 16 years ago but made the process more formal in recent years, creating a standard curriculum across the state’s seven regions. Those regions had previously used anywhere from no curriculum to about 12 hours of training.
Putting It Together: The program works through a partnership that includes Eastern Washington University, Boise State University, several smaller schools, and Casey Family Programs. The partners decided to create an expedited licensing procedure for kinship caregivers once “basic things are checked out,” but to require the caregivers to then finish the regular PRIDE (Parenting Resources Information Development Education ) curriculum to stay in good standing, Fordham says.
“They all have the same licensing requirements as general foster care,” she says.
Families Served: During the most recent contract year (July 2007 through June 2008), the program trained 868 caregivers, of whom about 213 were relatives of the children they care for.
Staff: Eight primary PRIDE trainers at the affiliated universities and other schools are each paired with a paid foster parent co-trainer and a social worker from the department, Fordham says.
Money: The foster training program’s budget (kinship and otherwise) is about $500,000 statewide, a “pull down” from the federal Administration for Children and Families IV-E program that funds university partnerships, along with state matching funds. Probably one-third of those trained are kinship caregivers, Fordham says, providing the best guess on what kinship care training alone costs.
A Second Chance
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Pittsburgh
(412) 342-0600
http://www.asecondchance-kinship.com
The Strategy: Place a heavy emphasis on clinical issues to educate kinship caregivers about reasons for acting-out behavior among children, and provide them with coping mechanisms and ways to combat the traumas of their foster children.
A Second Chance is a nonprofit agency in Allegheny County, Pa., that provides a range of kinship care services, including kinship care training, counseling, medical screenings, and crisis intervention information and referrals.
The agency developed its own kinship curriculum, Standards for Assessing and Recognizing Kinship Strengths (SARKS), which takes 14 hours over two days, according to Timothy Gonzalez, vice president of training, education and community development.
“The key themes that we try to hit,” he says, “are an introduction to the system, giving them an overview of what they will be experiencing as they go through the certification process, what they should expect as far as court hearings, changing lives and changing roles – aunts, older siblings, grandparents. We want to equip them with everything they need.”
One message, he said, is recognizing that “it’s a change for kids, from this being my grandparent, to a parental role.”
Getting Started: A Second Chance was founded in 1994 by its CEO, Sharon Lowe, a former caseworker for Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth and Families (CYF). “Through her experience there, she was noticing that the African-American population was underserved,” Gonzalez says. “She had a belief system that children are better off with family members. It’s less traumatic, a shorter adjustment period.”
Putting It Together: The county agency contracts with A Second Chance to provide the kinship training. The nonprofit started with nine employees, when it anticipated dealing with 300 children in the first year, but it reached that number within three months, Gonzalez says. “That forced us to get new office space, and we’ve been expanding ever since.”
Families Served: The program trains about 500 to 600 caregivers per year.
Staff: There are five kinship parent trainers among A Second Chance’s total staff of 150.
Money: The agency has an annual budget of $18 million, 97 percent of which comes from public sources, primarily CYF, Gonzalez says. It does not have a separate budget item for kinship training.
Results: Self-report surveys conducted by A Second Chance completed in 2006-07 by 100 kinship caregivers trained through the agency show that just 10 percent of kinship care children went through more than one placement, compared with 28 percent of the general foster care population; and 46 percent of kinship care arrangements led to reunification, compared with 33 percent of the overall foster care population. The general foster care numbers came from A Second Chance’s regional office in Philadelphia, which services traditional foster care. Kinship children were more likely to find a stable home more quickly, and less likely to experience developmental delays. Gonzalez adds the caveat that it’s difficult to establish a definitive cause-and-effect from the training to these results.
