SBIR-STTR Award

Adoptive placement of special needs foster children remains a high priority for child welfare agencies across the country. These children often show significant emotional and behavioral problems that challenge their parents long after the legalization of the adoption. Indeed, increasingly higher rates of unsuccessful (i.e., disrupted or legally dissolved) adoptions are associated with special needs placements. Special needs problems are emotionally expensive to both the child and parents and ultimately financially expensive to the agency and the state. Despite the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, there are approximately 119,000 "waiting" foster children, half of them ten years or older. These children are among the most difficult to place; their adoptive parents require specific and effective trainings. Research provides mounting evidence that post-adoptive services, notably ongoing adoptive parent training, are positively correlated with satisfying, stable, and intact adoptive placements. However, the parent training components of these services are not required and often not available throughout the US. The available courses are inconsistent in quality and focus. We propose developing a series of 14 interactive online courses/workshops designed to provide parents of special needs/ older-aged adopted children with high quality, readily available, intermediate and advanced training. The training with a practical approach would address a spectrum of serious behavior problems that adopted older and/or special needs children often exhibit. These problems may include sexualized behavior, self-harm, lying, eating disorders, sleep problems, running away, stealing, ADHD, or RAD. Courses will also be offered on positive and safe parenting techniques, working with birth families, and raising transracial/transcultural adopted children. In Phase I we will develop and evaluate a course/workshop on adopted children's' anger problems. The feasibility study will test the effectiveness of the course/workshop on increasing parents' knowledge of anger problems compared with a text-only online version of the program and a no-treatment control group. The training will be offered online by Northwest Media. Subjects participating in this project will gain important information about parenting special needs adoptive children that may help them to better understand and manage these children's disturbed behaviors. As a result, the quality of parent-child relationships in adoptive families could improve, which could help stabilize adoptive placements and improve children's short- and long-term mental health outcomes

In this revised Phase II, the project will develop and evaluate a set of five online training workshops designed to help foster-adoptive and kinship parents safely and empathically understand and reduce externalized behavior problems of children ages 3-10 in their care, following and throughout their placement. The training incorporates emerging theory about complex trauma and its relationship to the cardinal behavior problems of maltreated children in kinship and adoptive families. The proposed training series will address these issues by combining recommendations for intervention by the National Child Trauma Stress Network with a proven-effective approach titled Nurturing Parent Program. Each workshop uses an externalized behavior problem as a portal for parents to explore the historical and psychological basis of their child's problem;to examine and alter their non-empathic, unrealistic parent attitudes and expectations;and to learn how to effectively parent the child. The workshops are driven by a custom-designed software engine developed in Phase I that incorporates"serious game"features and that automates and seamlessly integrates media components, including video, audio, text, interactive exercises, individualized response exercises, and a participant discussion board. Results in Phase I provided support for the effectiveness of the interactive multimedia format for the parent workshop. Parents made significant gains in knowledge and confidence from pre- to post-test, and the gains were maintained at the 3-month follow-up assessment. Many adoptive and kinship parents find themselves feeling isolated, abandoned, and challenged by a child with severe behavior problems. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for the dissolution, disruption, or displacement of the adoption, along with a lifetime of emotional scars for the child and family. Children's behavioral problems also place them at risk of re-abuse in out-of-home care. Unlike any comparable resource, the proposed workshops have the potential of creating a paradigmatic shift in clinical practice by providing innovative online training and support specifically designed for post-placement families with children with special needs. Each workshop will be individually evaluated with a sample of post-placement families. Core outcome measures are a standardized part of the Nurturing Parent Program. In addition, we will assess changes in child externalized behavior problems. Outcomes will also be assessed at a 3-month follow-up.

Public Health Relevance:
Subjects participating in this project will gain important information about parenting foster-adoptive and kinship children with special needs. The training may help them to better understand and parent children's externalizing behavior problems. As a result, the quality of parent-child relationships in resource families could improve, which could help stabilize placements and improve children's short- and long-term mental health outcomes.