Calendrier Valor & Solutions

Informations générales

Foster parents play a crucial role in providing safe and stable homes to maltreated children placed in out-of-home care and in doing so are tasked with many challenges. Understanding how foster parents are able to overcome the challenges inherent to fostering, to continue to foster children long term, and to maintain a healthy level of family functioning provides insight into key retention and recruitment efforts. This presentation discusses findings from a larger study on foster family resilience. The study involved 20 foster families, all of whom had fostered over 5 years and rated as healthy functioning on the Family Assessment Device. Families participated in in-depth interviews to discuss the strengths their families relied on that allowed them to demonstrate resiliency. Empathy emerged as an essential foundation in the resiliency process. Foster families demonstrated empathy in three specific ways. First, was with the children they fostered, second was with the biological families of the children, and third was with the child welfare workers. Foster parents also attributed the empathy their children (fostered, adopted, and biological) demonstrated to the experience of being a foster family. The findings from this study have implications for both the child welfare workforce and foster families and will be discussed in the presentation.

Jennifer M. Geiger, PhD, MSW is an assistant professor in the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jennifer was in the inaugural cohort of the Doris Duke Fellowship for the Promotion of Child Well-Being from 2011-2013. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2014 with a PhD in Social Work and completed a postdoctoral fellowship there from 2014-15 to develop a campus-based recruitment and retention program for students who had experienced foster care. She currently teaches master’s level practice courses in the child and family concentration at UIC and her research focuses two areas of child welfare: youth aging out of foster care and foster family resilience, satisfaction, and support.