Clinical trial NCT04382677: Families Together: Intervention for Reunified Families
Official title: Intervention to Improve Outcomes for Foster Children Reunited With Their Birth Families
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Child Abuse
Child Neglect
Keywords: Child Welfare
Child Protective Services
Parenting
Lead sponsor: University of Washington
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
First posted: 2020-05-11
Enrollment: 240
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: TREATMENT

Brief summary: Birth parents of young children who have been placed into foster care are a highly vulnerable population of caregivers. Little is known about the ability of existing prevention programs to intervene with birth parents who have recently been reunified with their children under the age of six. This project aims to evaluate a brief, home-visiting intervention model with a sample of reunified birth parents, examining its effectiveness to improve parenting and child wellbeing, and reduce reoccurrence of maltreatment and reunification failure.

Detailed description: There is no brief, home visiting, evidence-based intervention designed for and evaluated with Child Welfare System (CWS) birth parents and their children under six, once they are reunified. Why is this important? Because reunified birth parents represent one of the highest risk subpopulations of parents whose challenges contribute both to their child's exposure to stress and trauma and to the intergenerational transmission of impaired parenting, maltreatment, and foster care placement.

Reunified birth parents are more likely than other parents to have been foster children and survivors of childhood maltreatment. They have higher rates of co-morbid mental health disorders, substance abuse, poverty, low education, and homelessness. When their children are placed in out-of-home care as infants or toddlers, they are more likely to have longer stays in foster care than any other age group. Foster children are at risk for serious emotional, behavioral, neurological, and physiological health problems, and for continued relationship disruptions, maltreatment, and foster care placements throughout their life course. Birth parents need intervention services when they reunite with their child to support the already fragile parent-child relationship. Even when birth parents work hard to fulfill court requirements to regain custody of their child, they are often left without the skills necessary to establish a strong and lasting connection with their child. This failure of service, we believe, leads reunified families to experience a high rate of maltreatment reoccurrence and reentry into foster care.

In this application we will evaluate the effectiveness of a community based, home visiting intervention program with a population of birth parents recently reunified with their child under the age of six after a foster care placement. In order to do this, we first adapt the program by adding material relevant to reunified birth families and adapt the material for older children. We will evaluate the effectiveness of Promoting First Relationships ® (PFR; Kelly et al., 2008) to meet the parenting needs of this vulnerable population. Promoting First Relationships was originally designed for children birth to three, and we will expand the curriculum to meet the needs of children through age six. Through a strong, established community partnership between the state, a community mental health agency, and the University of Washington, we will 1) adapt Promoting First Relationships ® (PFR) for reunified birth families and older children; 2) test the effectiveness of PFR to improve parental quality and parent-child interaction as compared to a Resource and Referral service; 3) test the effectiveness of PFR on reducing social, emotional, and behavioral problems in a population of children at risk for elevated emotional and behavioral disorders; 4) test the effectiveness of PFR in reducing referrals to Child Protective Services (CPS) and re-entry into foster care; and 5) test a proposed PFR theoretical model, linking the PFR intervention to improved parental insightfulness and emotional competence, which then contributes to parental sensitivity and improved child outcomes.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Birth parents reunited with their child (age 1-5 years) after a foster or kin care placement in trial return home status
* Parenting the child at study enrollment
* Child Welfare case served by the following Washington State offices: all of Region 2 South, Lynnwood, Tacoma, Everett, Smokey Point, and Lakewood
* Birth parents must be age 18 or older, mothers and fathers are eligible (one parent per study child enrolled)
* Conversant in English
* Access to a telephone
* Housing situation allows for home visits

Exclusion Criteria:

* Experiencing an acute crisis (e.g., hospitalization, incarceration)
* Previously received the Promoting First Relationships ® intervention or Child Parent Psychotherapy (CPP)

Primary outcomes:
measure: Child Welfare Services removal from birth parent home
timeFrame: 1 year post intervention
measure: Change in Parental Sensitivity (Video recorded observations coded by coders blind to intervention)
timeFrame: Post intervention (Time 2) -- approximately 6 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Parental Sensitivity (Video recorded observations coded by coders blind to intervention)
timeFrame: 6 months post intervention (Time 3) -- approximately 12 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Parenting Knowledge of Child Development
timeFrame: Post intervention (Time 2) -- approximately 6 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Parenting Knowledge of Child Development
timeFrame: 6 months post intervention (Time 3) -- approximately 12 months after Baseline (Time 1)
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Change in Child Externalizing Problem Behavior
timeFrame: Post intervention (Time 2) -- approximately 6 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Child Externalizing Problem Behavior
timeFrame: 6 months post intervention (Time 3) -- approximately 12 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Child Internalizing Problem Behavior
timeFrame: Post intervention (Time 2) -- approximately 6 months after Baseline (Time 1)
measure: Change in Child Internalizing Problem Behavior
timeFrame: 6 months post intervention (Time 3) -- approximately 12 months after Baseline (Time 1)
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Seattle
country: United States
facility: University of Washington, Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing
state: Washington
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Washington
name: Monica L Oxford, MSW, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: