Strive to enhance supervised family time visits for children in foster care: Outcomes from a pilot study with randomization

Abstract

Child welfare system reforms are needed to help support families and prevent removal of children who may safely remain in the home. For those children who have been removed from their parents’ care, parent–child visits are a way to help maintain bonds and attachment and may help mitigate the trauma of removal. The primary goals of this randomized, controlled study were to assess the effects of the Strive Supervised Family Time Program on parental engagement, attendance, parenting skills in visits and the quality of the visits among parents involved with the child welfare system. Parents within Washington State having supervised visits with their children (from newborns to age eight) were randomly assigned to either the Strive program (n = 58) or a ‘supervised visitation as usual’ comparison group (n = 50) and then recruited to participate in the study. The Strive program is a manualized, evidence- and trauma-informed five session curriculum delivered one on one to parents by a Strive-trained “Strive Navigator” once a week over five weeks. The five sessions focus on engaging parents, emphasizing the importance of visits, building a positive rapport between the parent and the Strive Navigator, understanding and anticipating children’s feelings and behaviors in visits, creating routines to provide support and reassurance to children, creating a safe and healthy visit environment, strategies for positive and productive communication, and following their child’s lead in play. Survey data were collected from parents at the beginning and at the end of program. Strive Navigators documented program fidelity, and child welfare agency visit report forms provided data on visit attendance. Parents in the Strive program were more engaged in and had higher quality parent–child visits. There was no effect on visit attendance. Overall, the Strive program was well received by parents and showed promise in increasing the quality of parent–child visits through parent engagement, support, and skill development in areas associated with safety and attachment, stress management and communication. Strive provides a promising program of engagement and support uniquely tailored to the needs of parents involved in the child welfare system at a critical time. The contribution of the Strive program may, in addition to benefiting individual families, represent an important family time practice improvement for child welfare systems.