Carole Shauffer

Consensus Statement on Group Care for Children and Adolescents: A Statement of Policy of the American Orthopsychiatric Association

Group care for children and adolescents is widely used as a rearing environment and sometimes used as a setting in which intensive services can be provided. This consensus statement on group care affirms that children and adolescents have the need and right to grow up in a family with at least 1 committed, stable, and loving adult caregiver. In principle, group care should never be favored over family care. Group care should be used only when it is the least detrimental alternative, when necessary therapeutic mental health services cannot be delivered in a less restrictive setting.

Foster Care for Young Children: Why It Must Be Developmentally Informed

Foster care is a societal intervention for orphaned, abandoned, and maltreated children. In the United States, more than 400,000 children are in foster care, and nearly half of those are younger than 5 years.1 These children are at substantially increased risk for psychopathology and account for a disproportionate share of public funding for psychiatric services, with spending perhaps 15 to 20 times as much as for low-income non-maltreated children.2 Although foster care has a social stigma, research clearly shows that high-quality foster care exists and is a far better alternative than other approaches to caring for abandoned or maltreated young children.3 Nevertheless, there is considerable room for improvement in “business as usual” foster care in the United States, and it is critical that improvements are implemented so that the needs of the youngest and most vulnerable children are met. We are focusing in this article on a central problem of foster care, which is that it is often not developmentally informed. Our central thesis is that foster care for young children should be a different intervention than for older children. Decades of developmental research on the science of attachment should inform how we design and implement foster care for young children, with young children roughly defined here as younger than 6 years. If foster care is developmentally informed, then crucial features will be more intentionally pursued, as they can and should be. Colleagues in child protection and family courts make complex and difficult decisions daily, and as practitioners and researchers, we must ensure that they have and apply the best available information to inform these decisions.

Delivering Services to Incarcerated Teen Fathers: A Pilot Intervention to Increase the Quality of Father-Infant Interactions During Visitation

The absence of a father figure has been linked to very poor developmental outcomes for the child. During incarceration, there are limited opportunities for visitation between fathers and their children. The Baby Elmo Program provides incarcerated teen fathers with parenting training and visitation with their children with the stated goal of enhancing father-child interactional quality. Forty-one incarcerated teen fathers and their infants ranging from 1 to 15 months of age participated in the present study. During individual sessions, a trained facilitator prepared fathers for visits with their children by introducing key concepts such as following the childs lead, using developmentally appropriate media to illustrate those concepts. After each training session, the incarcerated teen father interacted with his infant and the visit was video recorded. Analysis of the visit sessions focused on fathers time use on different activities, the quality of father-infant interactions, and fathers integration of target skills introduced in the intervention. The time-use analysis revealed that time use changed as a function of infant age. Growth linear modeling indicated that there were significant positive increases in the amount of parent support and infant engagement as a function of the number of sessions. Follow-up analyses indicated that changes between specific sessions mapped onto the target skills discussed during specific training sessions. This studys preliminary findings suggest that an intervention integrating visitation and appropriate media may be effective for incarcerated teen fathers. Due to the lack of a randomized control group, the present findings are exploratory and are discussed with a focus on further program development.

Recruiting for Excellence in Foster Care: Marrying Child Welfare Research With Brand Marketing Strategies

This project was developed to better understand the characteristics and behaviors of high-quality foster parents in order to inform a marketing strategy designed to “brand” high-quality care and create a recruiting campaign based upon the new foster parent “brand.” Focus groups were conducted with high-quality foster parents in six counties in a large Western state. Six unifying themes were uncovered which described the characteristics of high-quality foster parents. Behaviors exhibited by excellent foster parents were also distilled into six areas. Working with a branding team, a new strategy was developed to recruit and retain excellent foster parents. The marriage between the world of business advertising and the world of social work described here suggests the potential for similar strategies in the future.