Peer Mentoring in Child Welfare: A Motivational Framework.

Peer mentoring interventions for parents with substance use disorders who are involved with the child welfare system are relatively new, complex, individualized interventions and thus need to be understood both in regard to program efficacy and the processes of how they work. This qualitative study of the experiences of parents involved in a parent mentoring program suggested that certain practices helped motivate parents to think and act in ways that supported their goals and child welfare case plans. The three key mentoring practices that emerged were building caring relationships, providing guidance, and putting parents in charge. These practices promoted parents'positive self-beliefs (e.g., worthy of connection, competence), which helped motivate them to participate in services, cope constructively with difficulties, and more effectively manage behaviors and emotions. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) in particular, we propose a motivational framework for understanding how peer mentoring facilitates, or undermines, parents'motivation and results in their making progress on various aspects of their child welfare case. Implications for using the motivational model in future program development and evaluation efforts are discussed.

It's not as simple as it sounds: Problems and solutions in accessing and using administrative child welfare data for evaluating the impact of early childhood interventions.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in using administrative data collected by state child welfare agencies as a source of information for research and evaluation. The challenges of obtaining access to and using these data, however, have not been well documented. This study describes the processes used to access child welfare records in six different states and the approach to combining and using the information gathered to evaluate the impact of the Early Head Start program on children's involvement with the child welfare system from birth through age eleven. We provide "lessons learned" for researchers who are attempting to use this information, including being prepared for long delays in access to information, the need for deep understanding of how child welfare agencies record and code information, and for considerable data management work for translating agency records into analysis-ready datasets. While accessing and using this information is not easy, and the data have a number of limitations, we suggest that the benefits can outweigh the challenges and that these records can be a useful source of information for policy-relevant child welfare research.

The effect of Early Head Start on child welfare system involvement: A first look at longitudinal child maltreatment outcomes.

The high societal and personal costs of child maltreatment make identification of effective early prevention programs a high research priority. Early Head Start (EHS), a dual generational program serving low-income families with children prenatally through age three years, is one of the largest federally funded programs for infants and toddlers in the United States. A national randomized trial found EHS to be effective in improving parent and child outcomes, but its effectiveness in reducing child maltreatment was not assessed. The current study used administrative data from state child welfare agencies to examine the impact of EHS on documented abuse and neglect among children from seven of the original seventeen programs in the national EHS randomized controlled trial. Results indicated that children in EHS had significantly fewer child welfare encounters between the ages of five and nine years than did children in the control group, and that EHS slowed the rate of subsequent encounters. Additionally, compared to children in the control group, children in EHS were less likely to have a substantiated report of physical or sexual abuse, but more likely to have a substantiated report of neglect. These findings suggest that EHS may be effective in reducing child maltreatment among low-income children, in particular, physical and sexual abuse.

The power of protection: a population-based comparison of Native and non-Native youth suicide attempters.

This study provides actionable information about intervening with American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth to prevent suicide. Statewide school survey data were used to model the impact of risk and protective factors on self-reported suicide attempts (both AI/AN and non-AI/AN). The cumulative risk and protective model worked similarly for both groups. AI/AN youth had a higher threshold of risk before making a suicide attempt. Protective factors buffered the impact of risk, particularly for the higher risk youth.

Does attachment style influence social support or the other way around? A longitudinal study of Early Head Start mothers.

Understanding the association between attachment style and social support is important for informing programs that seek to improve outcomes for families by intervening with either or both of these systems. The present study examines whether increasing levels of social support among 181 low-income, primarily African American mothers leads to changes in their self-reported attachment style, or whether attachment style influences the extent to which they perceive others as supportive. Results suggest that whereas scores on the avoidant attachment dimension were relatively stable and led to decreasing perceptions of social support over time, scores on the anxious dimension were more malleable, at least under conditions of low stress. For mothers who experienced fewer stressful life events, increasing social support led to decreased attachment anxiety over time. However, when life stress was high, social support had no such positive influence. Implications for the need to attend to mothers' attachment styles in providing appropriate and effective intervention are discussed.

Capturing the friendship context with a collective property: friendship group engagement vs. disaffection.

The purpose of this study was to introduce a motivational property of the group, friendship group engagement vs. disaffection, and to examine different composition models for combining individual reports into an indicator of a group-level property. Data were collected from 312 ninth grade students and their teachers. Self-reported friendship group (FG) engagement and disaffection were related to self-reported classroom engagement, aggression, and peer problem behavior, but not to teacher-reported classroom engagement. Group-reported FG engagement and disaffection were related to self-reported FG engagement and disaffection, classroom engagement, aggression, and peer problem behavior, but these relationships were moderated by within-group agreement on the group property. Findings underscore the importance of a priori conceptualization of group-level properties that are theoretically linked to adolescent adjustment, and the need to consider composition models when aggregating individual reports to create profiles of the group. Implications for future work on capturing properties of friendship groups are discussed.

How do relationships support parenting? Effects of attachment style and social support on parenting behavior in an at-risk population.

The importance of supportive relationships for new parents has been the focus of both research and parenting interventions. Attachment style, typically viewed as a relatively stable trait reflecting one's comfort in social relationships, as well as social support, or one's perception of the social context, have both been found to be important for fostering engaged, involved parenting. Less is known, however, about how these variables work together to influence parenting behavior, especially in families at higher risk for negative child outcomes. Data were collected from 152 urban, predominantly African American, low-income parents when their children were 14 and 36 months of age. Results suggest that parents with more social support show greater increases in the frequency of positive parent-child activities over time, but that this effect is mediated by mothers' attachment style, specifically, their level of anxious/ambivalent attachment. Mothers with more social support tended to be less anxious/ambivalent about close relationships, and this in turn led to increases over time in the frequency of parent-child interactions. Mothers' tendency to avoid close relationships, however, while correlated with social support, was unrelated to changes in parenting behavior. Implications of these findings for program development, parenting, and the malleability of attachment style based on social context are discussed.

Is the adoption and safe families act influencing child welfare outcomes for families with substance abuse issues?

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was designed to promote more timely permanent placements for children in the child welfare system. To date, however, available data have said little about whether ASFA is meeting its intended goals. This study looks at the impact of ASFA on parents struggling with substance abuse issues. The authors compared child welfare outcomes, pre- and post-ASFA, for children of more than 1,900 substance-abusing women with some treatment involvement. After the implementation of ASFA, children in this study spent less time in foster care, were placed in permanent settings more quickly, and were more likely to be adopted than remain in long-term foster care. The proportion of children who were reunified with their parent or parents stayed the same. These outcomes were apparent even controlling for case and family characteristics. Results are discussed in terms of the influence of ASFA on service delivery systems.

How effective are family treatment drug courts? Outcomes from a four-site national study.

Family treatment drug courts (FTDCs) are a rapidly expanding program model designed to improve treatment and child welfare outcomes for families involved in child welfare who have substance abuse problems. The present study compares outcomes for 250 FTDC participants to those of similar parents who did not receive FTDC services in four sites. Results show that FTDC parents, compared to comparison parents, entered substance abuse treatment more quickly, stayed in treatment longer, and completed more treatment episodes. Furthermore, children of FTDC parents entered permanent placements more quickly and were more likely to be reunified with their parents, compared to children of non-FTDC participants. Finally, the FTDC program appears to have a "value added" in facilitating positive child welfare outcomes above and beyond the influence of positive treatment experiences.

Understanding patterns of substance abuse treatment for women involved with child welfare: the influence of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).

The passage of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), which calls for timely permanency planning for children placed into state foster care systems, has led to increased attention to the need for timely and appropriate treatment services to families with substance abuse issues who are involved with child welfare. Using statewide administrative data collected before and after the implementation of ASFA, the present study explores the influence of ASFA, as well as other family characteristics, on patterns of treatment service utilization by child-welfare involved clients. Findings suggest that in the period following the ASFA legislation, mothers entered substance abuse treatment significantly more quickly after the start of their child welfare cases, and remained in treatment longer, compared to pre-ASFA. No differences in rates of treatment completion were found. Results are interpreted in terms of the changing treatment service context, enhanced collaboration between child welfare and treatment systems, and the possible influence of the legislation on parents' motivation to enter treatment.