Improving the quality of visits during family foster care: Birth families experiences through a positive parenting programme.

Abstract

This communication has the twofold objective of presenting, on the one hand, the first Spanish psychoeducational programme aimed at improving the quality of contact visits between foster children and their birth families, Visits: a context for family development (Bernedo et al., 2020). On the other hand, the impact of participation in the pilot implementation of this programme on birth families parenting competences and the quality of visits with their child. The aim of the programme is to improve birth families and non-kinship foster carers’ emotional, communication, and parenting competences. It includes two training modules, one for each family, with seven sessions: six individual sessions and one group session. The pilot implementation of the programme with birth families took place in the hour prior to consecutive scheduled visits with the child. Five families began the program, and three mothers completed all seven sessions. Through content analysis of the pre-and post-intervention interviews with the birth mothers who completed the programme, changes in relation to four aspects were identify: (1) appraisal of visits, (2) collaboration with the foster family, (3) planning for visits, and (4) characteristics of visits and parent-child interaction. In addition, one more theme emerged from the analysis of post-intervention interviews: (5) Support received through participation in the program. The results point out the potential of the programme to improve the quality of contact visits between birth parents and their children in non-kinship foster care, as well as to encourage collaboration between the birth and foster families. The pilot study shown that the programme Visits: a context for family development is a useful resource for child welfare professionals to use in promoting positive parenting in the context of contacts during long-term foster placement, above all in supporting parents so as to make visits a more rewarding experience for all those involved.