Preparing and Partnering with Families to Support the Adoption of Children from Foster Care

ABSTRACT

This investigation evaluated the effectiveness of a pre-placement education and preparation curriculum (PREP) for prospective foster/adoptive parents in improving attitudes toward children with prenatal substance exposure and their substance-using birth parent and increasing willingness to adopt these children. Participants included 1,836 prospective parents seeking adoption through foster care who received three 3-hour sessions of PREP. Prospective parents completed questionnaires assessing their knowledge about important issues involved in adopting a child from foster care, attitudes, and willingness to adopt children with a variety of characteristics. Changes from pre- to post-intervention were examined. Results indicated significant increases in self-reported knowledge; significantly more positive attitudes toward substance-abusing parents and children with prenatal substance exposure; and significantly increased willingness to adopt children with a variety of potential difficulties, including children with serious behavior problems, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and a biological history of mental illness. In sum, findings suggest that prospective adoptive parents who attended the PREP sessions felt better prepared by the end of training with regard to issues related to adoption of high-risk foster children with special needs, particularly those with prenatal substance exposure.     

Appropriate Therapeutic Care for Families with Pre-Pubescent Transgender/Gender-Dissonant Children

In recent years, a new phenomenon has been observed in U.S. culture, that of pre-pubescent children transitioning socially from one gender role to another, with the support of their families. As this phenomenon becomes more widespread, families, schools and other institutions will turn to mental health care professionals for guidance in navigating new territory. Such children have often been assessed for gender identity disorder; the traditional treatment plan for those so diagnosed included attempts to steer their gender behavior in more “gender-appropriate” directions. Allowing such children to self-actualize, viewing their behavior as indicative of innate identity, is a relatively new approach. This paper will focus on the social worker’s or therapist’s role in helping pre-pubescent children and their families, should the families decide identity actualization is the path they would prefer.     

The Body Comes to Family Therapy: Utilising Research to Formulate Treatment Interventions with Somatising Children and their Families

Children and adolescents with functional somatic symptoms are challenging to understand and to treat. The challenges begin at the very outset of the intervention – with the neurological and psychiatric assessments. Patients presenting with functional somatic symptoms, as well as their families, frequently deny any emotional or family problem, and parents are often genuinely baffled as to why a child has suddenly become so ill and why no medical explanation is forthcoming. Families can be unwilling to engage in family assessment and therapy, and therapists may find that standard approaches to family therapy simply can end up alienating these families – the door to therapy is slammed shut. This article is the story of my struggle to understand somatising children and their families and to find a common language to enable us to co‐construct formulations, to agree to a treatment plan, and to work together towards a pathway to health. It is also about the role of research and how knowledge from different system levels – and most specifically about the body – may need to be integrated into the therapy to help bring about change.     

The Child Care Arrangements of Preschool-Age Children in Immigrant Families in the United States

This study examined the child care arrangements of children in immigrant families. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the study found great diversity in the child care arrangements of children according to their nativity status. Children in immigrant families, especially those in low‐income immigrant families, were found less likely to use centre‐based child care. Mexican, Asian, and other Hispanic children are also less likely to use centre‐based child care. Because quality centre‐based child care has been shown to benefit preschool‐age children and help prepare them for school, both scholastically and psychologically, less use of centre‐based child care among children in immigrant families compared to children in non‐immigrant families is a potentially troubling finding. Public policies promoting greater access to and more use of centre‐based child care, especially for low‐income immigrant families and two‐parent immigrant families, may make a significant difference to their children's long‐term adaptation, and their children's school readiness and achievement.     

Voluntary Organizations and Attitudes Toward the Community*

Voluntary organizations have long been believed to have important effects on the attitudes of their members, but the relatively few attempts to investigate such effects have produced inconsistent results. This paper uses a statewide proportional sample to investigate relationships between (a) membership and participation in ten types of voluntary organizations and (b) two types of attitudes about the community. After individual and community characteristics were controlled, experience with voluntary organizations was found to explain about five percent of the variance in respondents' perceptions of their ability to influence community affairs, but relationships with willingness to leave the community were considerably weaker. Somewhat stronger relationships were found when the analysis was confined to respondents for whom voluntary organizations or community participation was particularly salient. Overall, this paper indicates that the impact of voluntary organizations on community attitudes is weaker than earlier theoretical statements have suggested. However, it also shows that the relationship varies according to type of organization, salience of participation for the respondent, respondents' sociodemographic characteristics, and the specific community attitude being investigated.     

The Profile of Board Membership in Israeli Voluntary Organizations

This study of 161 nonprofit organizations in Israel was aimed at exploring the composition of boards, the methods employed to recruit new board members, and the selection criteria of board members. The results suggest that boards tend to be closed, elitist circles. Most organizations use mainly informal means to recruit new board members. The most important selection criteria were those related to interpersonal relationships, willingness to contribute time, and expressing an interest in working for the organization.     

Early Child Care and the School Readiness of Children from Mexican Immigrant Families1

Combining conceptual models from immigration and educational research, this study investigated whether a normative antecedent to the transition to formal schooling in the contemporary U.S. – early child care – links Mexican immigrant status to various aspects of school readiness. Regression models with nationally representative data revealed that children from Mexican immigrant families were overrepresented in parental care and underrepresented in center‐based care compared to their native peers from other race/ethnic populations, which helped to explain a significant but small portion of their generally lower rates of both math achievement and externalizing symptoms in kindergarten. This mediating role of early child care, however, paled in comparison to family socioeconomic circumstances.     

Expensive Children in Poor Families: Out‐of‐Pocket Expenditures for the Care of Disabled and Chronically Ill Children in Welfare Families

A significant minority of poor families care for children with disabilities and chronic illnesses. This study is among the first to explore private costs resulting from children's disabilities among low‐income families. We find that almost half of the sample of California AFDC families with special‐needs children incurred some direct, out‐of‐pocket expenses in the preceding month, and about 20% incurred total costs exceeding $100. We also estimate lost employment income among low‐income mothers caring for children with disabilities. We conclude that both out‐of‐pocket expenses and foregone earnings represent a substantial burden for many low‐income families with special‐needs children, and we discuss the policy implications of these findings.     

The Decoupling of Organizational Society: The Case of Norwegian Voluntary Organizations

The means, motives, and opportunity of cooperation must be present if organizations are to establish mutual ties. Public benefit and conflict oriented organizations are hypothesized to have stronger motives for cooperation than member benefit and consensus oriented groups, and organizations with broad activity scope are likely to face more opportunities of cooperation than specialized organizations. These hypotheses are strengthened by results from regression analyses. The article further shows a historical decline in both the motives and opportunities for such cooperation in the case of Norway through processes of depoliticization, individualization, and specialization. Thus, here, the preconditions for cooperation within organizational society are gradually deteriorating. Such developments are likely to weaken the interconnectedness of voluntary organizations and the potential micro, meso, and macro benefits of such ties.     

Families with Children with Disabilities - Inequalities and the Social Model

This article suggests that families with children with disabilities experience a range of inequalities that families with children without disabilities do not suffer. It draws on a recent qualitative study to illustrate the way in which it is not just disabled people, but in the case of disabled children, whole families that suffer from unequal opportunities and outcomes. We draw on the social model of disability to show that the lives of these families are often characterised by financial hardship, stress and anxiety as a result of social barriers, prejudices and poorly conceived service provision. The social model of disability is usually drawn upon to illustrate the way in which social organisation disables people with impairments. In this instance, we illustrate the way in which social organisation disables not just the family member who has an impairment but the whole family unit. By applying this model of disability, new ways of creating practices and policies for these families can be developed which incorporate their views into the heart of the policy-making process.     

The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project

This article describes and updates the work of the Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project, which engages with community concerns in order to effect change on many system levels. The project draws on family therapy's tradition of interest in larger social issues and adds democratic public theory and community organizing strategies. Since 1999 we have developed 14 citizen initiatives with a wide range of groups on a diverse set of problem areas. We describe the overall project and several of its initiatives, we address research and evaluation issues, and we outline opportunities for marriage and family therapists to learn how to do this work in their own communities.     

Stability and Change in Nonprofit Organizations: The Volunteer Contribution

This paper reports on a study of the microprocesses of stability and change in a nonprofit welfare organization in Australia. We position volunteering and voluntarism as core constitutive phenomena in and of nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector more generally, and examine volunteer agency in action. Developing a model drawn from neoinstitutional theory and adopting an ethnographic approach, the paper illustrates theoretically and empirically how volunteers create and revise institutional orders operative within organizations in ways hitherto poorly articulated and understood.     

The Role of Children in Eastern European Families

This study examines the additive effect of attitudes towards gender roles and importance of marriage on the centrality of children in seven East European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenia using the data from the 1994 International Social Science Survey (ISSP). Results support country related differences in participants' attitudes about gender roles, marriage and children. The results show former East Germany as being the most egalitarian country, Bulgaria and Hungary as the most traditional ones, and Poland, Slovenia, Russia and Czech Republic in between. A model of the dynamics among attitudes towards gender roles, importance of marriage and the centrality of children was tested for the goodness‐of‐fit using structural equation models (AMOS 4.0) techniques by the method of maximum likelihood. The goodness‐of‐fit provided evidence that the hypothesised model was stable. The results indicated that attitudes towards gender roles and marriage have a strong impact on attitudes toward children.     

Single Parenting in Families of Children with Disabilities

Rearing a child with disabilities is a challenge, per- haps even more so for single parents who most often are women. Stress and negative psychological effects have been considered likely outcomes for parents of children with disabilities. With the increased family focus in the provision of services for children with disabilities, it becomes even more important to understand the sources of stress and the types of adaptations made in these families. The research literature was analyzed and similar results were found. Single mothers of children with disabilities often were younger, had less education, and lower incomes. Few studies included these socio- economic factors. Findings indicate that gross differences betweensingle- and two-parent mothers tended to become nonsignificant when maternal education and income were taken into account. Stress levels and adaptation were not pervasively different for single mothers and mothers who were parenting with a partner, after SES variables were controlled. On a few dimensions-including family harmony, integration, and cohesion-some studies found mothers in single parent families to be at a slight disadvantage relative to two parent families. Research findings indicate that other factors need to be considered in research and in provision of services to understand the interplay between stress and adaptation and to facilitate the fami- lys coping. Further study is needed on factors on two levels; task demands and emotional responses, the diversity among mothers, their life situations, and their task demands must be recognized, and socioeconomic conditions and participation by other adults in care- giving. Positive adaptation by single mothers of children who have disabilities is a reasonable expectation; services should build upon family strengths and competencies.     

The Sustainability of Substitute Family Care for Children Separated from Their Families by War: Evidence from Mozambique

This article presents the findings of an empirical study exploring the sustainability of the substitute family in supporting children separated from their families during Mozambique's 16‐year civil conflict. It describes shifts in the boundaries that have defined arrangements for the care of children separated from their normative family care givers and shows that, contrary to received wisdom based on traditional forms of child care, children and substitute families have achieved lasting relationships through new forms of mutual support that typify indigenous coping mechanisms in times of stress.     

Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization's income, paid staff, membership size, and library resources are significantly related to getting media publicity, whereas the number of chapter affiliations is inversely related to publicity. Association type is also a significant factor that influences an organization's ability to get publicity. We discuss the implications that these findings have for current debates about advocacy and civic engagement in the nonprofit sector.     

The strategic challenges of cooperation and competition in British Voluntary Organizations: Toward the next century

The interrelationships between public, private, and voluntary sectors in Britain have witnessed increasing levels of change in recent years. This article argues that there have recently been identifiable trends within the voluntary sector, namely, increased levels of competition between sectors, increased competition between voluntary organizations, and increased pressures toward professionalization in voluntary sector management and organization. Predominantly competitive strategies and modes of professionalization have often been borrowed uncritically from commercial “best practice” by voluntary organizations. Thompson's (1967) typology of strategies is used as a basis for proposing cooperation as an alternative to competition in the British voluntary sector.     

Child Protection,Voluntary Organizations,and the Public Sector in Sweden

This paper presents an analysis of the role of Swedish voluntary organizations within the field of child protection as well as processes of institutionalization within such organizations. The empirical focus is on the two most important voluntary organizations within the field today, namely Rädda Barnen (Save the Children) and BRIS (Children's Right in Society). And their importance within the child protection discourse, as well as their role as producers of welfare, is discussed. In the latter respect two different processes of professionalization—professionalization of volunteers and avant-garde professionalism—are identified. It is demonstrated that the relationship between the state and voluntary organizations is a key issue when understanding the nature of the organizations and their role in the organizational landscape.