Empathy as an Essential Foundation to Successful Foster Parenting

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 ter...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child and family studies 2016-12, Vol.25 (12), p.3771-3779
Main Authors: Geiger, Jennifer M., Piel, Megan Hayes, Lietz, Cynthia A., Julien-Chinn, Francie J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abused children
Adopted children
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Child and School Psychology
Child Rearing
Child welfare
Children & youth
Empathy
Family Assessment Device
Family Involvement
Family relations
Foster care
Foster carers
Foster children
Home health care
Job Satisfaction
Labor force
Mental Health
Original Paper
Parents
Parents & parenting
Psychology
Recruitment
Resilience
Retention
Social Sciences
Social Work
Sociology
Systems Approach
Youth workers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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. Twenty foster families, all of whom had fostered over 5 years and rated as healthy functioning on the Family Assessment Device, 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.
ISSN:1062-1024
1573-2843
DOI:10.1007/s10826-016-0529-z