Transcript CO-PARENTING - Home | Florida Department of Children and

CO-PARENTING:
Challenging ourselves to safely
build joint support and transitions
for children in care
Dependency Summit
September 7-9, 2011
Hon. Jeri Cohen, T. Petkovich,
J. Niarchos, J.D. and L.Katz, Ed.D.
Multi-Faceted Process
• Implications for foster families and birth
families
• Implications for agency policies and procedures
• Implications for system change
• Implications for training retooling
• Implications for both overt and hidden agendas
• Implications for legal and statutory compliance
CO-PARENTING SKILLS
From the Foster Family Perspective:
• Know your own family and their feelings
• Communicate effectively about your comfort zone
• Know the children
• Self-evaluate your own understanding of loss and
attachment pertaining to the child’s emotional
needs
• Seek training that will expand knowledge
• Ask yourself how you would like to build
connections
CO-PARENTING
• Strategize how the process can build self –
esteem in the child and the bio family
• Assure yourself that health and safety of the
child and foster family will be maintained
• Jointly monitor the impact of the process as
it unfolds
• Accept that there needs to be elasticity in
the process
CO-PARENTING
How does working in partnership with birth parents
validate the role of the foster family?
• Foster parents have the responsibility to provide safe and
nurturing homes for the children in our care.
• Foster parents commit to helping their children grow and
develop.
• Foster parents work with their agency to keep the best
interest of the child a priority.
CO-PARENTING
• Identifying the opportunities
and challenges inherent in
creating a partnership with the
birth parents that opens the
door to the child’s best interests
and permanency planning.
CO-PARENTING
Birth Family Perspective:
Components of an
effective partnership with
foster family:
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Willingness to work in cooperation
Effective communication
Recognition that both families can
make valuable contributions
Clear expectations and roles/
boundaries are set and reexamined
Honesty and Trust
CO-PARENTING
Barriers from the birth parents’
perspectives:
• Sense of failure
• Lack of confidence
• Anger: being judged
• Mistrust of the system
• Personal agendas
CO-PARENTING
• Overall lack of
information sharing
• Mistrust of the foster
parent
• Reluctance to ask for
training and support
• Inconsistent messages
CO-PARENTING
A birth mother’s perspective, taken from Believing
in Families by Zamosky, Sharp, Hatt and
Sharman.
“ The foster families hold all the power…and the state already
thinks they can do a better job than me. What chance do I
have? They have a better house, more money, and there are
two of them and one of me. I feel like they are judging me.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just gave up … and
then I say no, I love my kids and I can be a good mom to
them… its all just so hard”.
CO-PARENTING
From the agency perspective: Co-parenting must be
a part of every aspect of the system of care:
• Recruitment (How will this change who we
recruit?)
• Training /orientation-MAPP
• Child placement logistics
• Team meeting/family team conference
• Case plan conferences
• Individualizing the expectations
CO-PARENTING
“Building a relationship with families necessitates
reevaluating and rethinking the way we
fundamentally intervene with families. It requires
being able to communicate to families our
unwavering conviction that birth parents can
grow and safely care for their children”.
Believing in Families - Zamosky, Sharp, Hatt and
Sharman
CO-PARENTING
Co-parenting strategies support the
children
• More child-centered
• Less adversarial
• More organized/Less fragmented
• Communication framed in neutral terms
• Reduces child’s externalizing behavior
• Presents a united parenting front mediates
instability
• Both parties become active listeners of the
child
• Information can be shared as opposed to
message delivery only
• Addresses problems without blame
Preliminary Research on
Approaches to Co-parenting
Basic premise is that child’s emotional
adjustment to foster care can be best
facilitated when there is an
acknowledgement that the caregivers will
have unequal roles over the life of the case,
when they agree that direct communication
can help the child, and when they can
communicate about potential interpersonal
conflict.
One Study – Approach to Co-parenting
(Linares, Montalto, Li & Oza, 2006
• Study in New York examined effects when
biological parents and foster parents (non
kinship) attended sessions of parenting classes
together.
• Pairs of bio and foster parents were randomized
into treatment as usual vs. joint intervention
• Bio parents got 2 hours parenting weekly by
themselves and 1 hour jointly with foster parents
in the study intervention.
Criteria for Participants
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Substantiated child maltreatment case
Residence in a non kinship foster home
Goal was reunification
64 parent pairs enrolled/randomized
Evidence-based curriculum was used
(Incredible Years, Webster-Stratton, 2001)
• Co-facilitated group leaders did bio only and
joint group
Study Protocol
• Assessments were done at baseline, post
completion and at 3 months follow-up
• Goal of joint sessions: expand knowledge of
each other, practiced open communication,
negotiated inter-parental topics of conflict
such as discipline, bedtimes
• Fidelity to the curriculum was monitored
through taped sessions looking at format
and group process
Assessments
• Parenting Practices Interview (Webster-Stratton,
1998)
• Family Functioning Style Scale(Dunst, Trivette and
Deal, 1998)
• Child Behavior Check List (Achenbach,1991)
• HOME (Caldwell & Bradley, 1984)
• Additional child behavior inventories
• Session Attendance
Outcomes
• For intervention group there was
endorsement by both sets of parents for use
of positive discipline
• Both groups demonstrated clearer
understanding of appropriate
developmental expectations
• Higher degree of flexibility
• Consensus on less externalizing behaviors
of the child
Implications for Practice**
• Co-parenting approaches should
incorporate structured strategies for how
the pairs of parents will interact effectively
• Participation of both sets of parents in some
joint trainings is one strategy
• Gain buy-in from the agencies and child
welfare that the benefits are understood but
that the challenges will occur
Implications for Practice
• Conceptually having the pairs of parents on
the same page can support the child’s
emotional well-being
• Training would need to include trust
building and structured procedures for how
all would communicate and interact
• Shows promise as a strategy to support
“best interests” of the child.
Where do we go next?
• Development of agency protocols for
foster families and biological
families so that interactions occur in
an organized, agreed upon manner.
• Clarification of roles and
responsibilities
• Define what co-parenting looks like
in our community and how it is to be
implemented.
• Challenges and impediments
BU
Secure
Attachment
Relationships
Safe
Homes
Health and permanency
Safe
Environments
Opportunities
To Learn
Adequate
Shelter and
Nourishment
Co-Parenting
• Is a strategy where foster parents work in partnership with the child’s birth
parents toward the goal of reunification. This team approach to parenting
allows both families to bring their strengths to focus on the well-being of the
child and allows the child to focus on growing, learning, playing and
developing to his/her potential during a difficult time.
Benefits of Co-Parenting:
• Puts the minds of the birth parents at ease to meet the people who are caring
for their children.
• Gives the parents access to asking personal questions of the caregivers about
the children's mental and physical health as well as school, day care and
everyday happenings.
Benefits of Co-parenting - continued
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Encourages the birth parents that the caregivers of their children are working with
them to obtain reunification by encouraging positive parenting with their children.
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Provides the family engagement team with 24/7 knowledge of how the process is
affecting the children and their relationship to the birth parents.
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Is the stepping stone to support the birth parents in continued communication with
their children in a more natural environment than the supervised visits, whether it be
telephone communication, unsupervised visits, accompanying the foster parent to
doctor visits and school events and/or meetings etc.
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Supports the family engagement team in the goal of reunification through
reinforcement of positive support and encouragement of the birth parents to complete
their tasks and reunify with their children.
Practice changes:
• Foster parents who accept children with a goal
of reunification commit to participate in coparenting.
• Foster parents meet with the parents within 48
hours of the child’s removal in an “ice breaker”
meeting facilitated by the case manager. The
team begins exploring how to best support the
family including how the foster parents will
support and encourage the biological family.
What Foster parents do to
engage the birth family :
• Transport child to visits with biological families.
• Send them pictures of the child.
• Send them the child’s school work/report cards.
• Have the child write them a letter or make a picture.
• Invite them to sporting events the child is involved in.
What Foster parents do to engage the
birth family :
• Invite them to birthday parties and school events.
• Encourage them to attend the child’s
medical/dental/psychological appointments.
• Arrange with other foster parents to do sibling visits if
the children are separated.
• Share the details of important milestones in the child’s
life, such as walking, talking, starting school, awards, etc.
Next steps: Implementation
• Jurisdictional planning-where are we now?
• Getting the buy-in from families and staffers
• Monitoring practice changes at the practitioner
level-how will we know what we have changed
• Seeking client satisfaction feedback
• Examining ways to measure improved outcomes
of families