by Tracy Whitney
Foster, kinship, and adoptive caregivers are looking for safe spaces where they can get support and training for the challenges they face every day. Parent support groups can be a valuable tool for building connections, increasing parental confidence, and increasing knowledge about the unique needs of the children and their parents.
Through our work at Creating a Family we have done a deep dive into academic research on peer- to-peer support and learned from our experience and research that parent support groups are one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to support foster, kinship, and adoptive parents.
Here are just a few of the known benefits that effective parent support groups can have for resource parents:
- Improved quality of family life.
- Decreased anxiety.
- Decreased stress.
- Increase in parenting confidence.
- Feeling understood and a sense of community.
- Increased awareness that they were not alone.
- More likely to access resources.
- Improved family functioning.
- More efficiently meet their children’s needs, with greater confidence and hope.
- Increased awareness of the importance of self- care.
- Decreased internalized blame.
Foster, adoptive, and kinship parents attend sup- port groups for a variety of reasons. All parents hit road bumps when parenting. Foster, kinship, and adoptive families are likely to hit more of these bumps along the way. When they face a crisis with their children, these parents and caregivers benefit from being with others who “get it.” Raising a child exposed to trauma or neglect can be an isolating and lonely journey. Parents and caregivers need the camaraderie and encouragement that these communities offer. They need to know they are not alone.
Parents and caregivers may also recognize that they need additional education and training, whether for a particular issue or general information about the age and stage of parenting they are facing. Unfortunately, it is hard to predict ahead of time which parenting skills they will need until the child or youth is living in their home. Attending a parent support group that provides skill-building or training can fill in the gaps.
Finally, foster and kinship caregivers seek out parent support groups because they want to learn in a safe space where they will not be judged for what they do not know. They may often feel like they are “under a microscope” with the many visitations, therapies, and caseworker check-ins that fill their calendars. That feeling of being watched can inhibit learning for some resource parents or caregivers. A parent support group offers a peer-to-peer learning environment. The sense of equal footing with peers who “get it” can open them up to increased learning. After all, it is not just our children who learn better when they feel safe.
The most effective parent support groups are spaces of empathetic understanding where parents and caregivers choose to learn and grow together, even when that information may stretch their skills or beliefs.
Tracy Whitney is a Content Manager and runs support groups with Creating a Family, a North Carolina based nonprofit organization whose mission is to strengthen foster, adoptive, and kinship families and the professionals who support them by creating expert-based, trauma-informed resources, community support, and training.
