About 120 Hamilton County foster parents and children this year will be invited to participate in a study centering around positive parent-child interactions. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services are partnering to study efficiency of Child Adult Relationship Enhancement (CARE) training. 

“This is an amazing opportunity for foster parents to enhance their skills, reduce their stress and avoid disruptions caused by a foster child's behavior,” said Karen Sauers, project manager from Hamilton County Job and Family Services.

CARE includes a six-hour training session that teaches skills to help foster parents build good relationships and manage behavior problems of children placed in their homes.  

The hands-on training features role playing and observations. It’s modeled after techniques used in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, a unique combination of behavioral therapy, play therapy and parent training designed to teach more effective discipline techniques and enhance the parent-child relationship. 

Trainers from the Ohio Child Welfare Training Program will train foster parents at the agency’s Loveland office and Children’s Hospital.  These trainers have received intensive training in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and CARE from Dr. Erica Pearl of Children’s Hospital.

To study the benefits of CARE, foster parents will be randomly selected for participation in CARE training. This means that half of the foster parents will participate in the CARE training and half of the foster parents will participate in training as usual. Foster parent/child participation may last up to a year. Families will complete quarterly questionnaires and provide feedback for the study. (They’ll get a $20 Kroger gift card each quarter for completing the questionnaire.) Children over age 11 also will be asked to complete questionnaires. 

This will be done with assistance from HCJFS support workers. Children’s Hospital staff will compile and analyze the data. They will measure if CARE has affected stability of placements, reduced stress of foster parents, and/or improved behavior of foster parents. 

Those not initially randomized into the CARE training will participate in all other aspects of the study, such as completing the initial and quarterly questionnaires. They will be given an opportunity to participate in CARE training at conclusion of the study. 

The study’s leaders say that successful outcomes and completion of the study could lead to additional federal funding. That could lead to training for more foster parents as well as biological parents.