Foster parenting together: Foster parent couples

Abstract

Almost two-thirds of children in non-relative foster care live in homes headed by married couples. However, the literature includes little about either the role of foster fathers or the complexity and importance of the marital context for fostering. This study examined family functioning, overt interparental hostility, depression, and parental acceptance in a sample of 111 heterosexual foster parent couples and the relationship between family context and potential to foster parent successfully. Latent class analysis revealed three distinct types of foster parent couples, “Good Context” (33%), “Typical” (56%), and “Bad Context-Discordant” (11%) couples. “Bad Context-Discordant” couples are notable for having much lower scores on all context measures, for differences between mothers and fathers, and for the fact that most fathers had depression scores in the clinical range. Finally, results indicated that better family context was related to greater potential to foster successfully and that on three of five dimensions measured mothers exhibited greater potential.