Early childhood is increasingly understood as a particularly vulnerable period of development. In addition to the fact that there is an extensive amount of brain development that occurs during this time, young children are highly dependent on parents or parent figures to support their emotional and cognitive development, and to buffer them against stress (Shonkoff, Boyce, & McEwen, 2009). As such, children who require placement in foster care due to parental neglect and maltreatment during early childhood are at especially high risk for poor health, educational, and mental health outcomes. Evidence-based programmess do exist to address the needs of young foster children. In particular, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) is an attachment-based intervention designed for foster infants and toddlers (Dozier, Lindheim, & Ackerman, 2005). Treatment Foster Care Oregon for Preschoolers (TFCO-P) is a social-learning intervention for children ages 3-6 (Fisher & Gilliam, 2012). Both programmes have been shown to have positive impacts on reducing the effects of early adverse experiences, both during the time they are in care and afterwards (Fisher et al., 2006). However, these programmes were originally developed to fit the context of the foster care system in America. Although there have been some efforts to adapt existing evidence-based interventions in the context of other countries (e.g., Roberts, 2007), the effectiveness of these approaches and their long-term sustainability outside of America at present unclear. In this paper, we describe an alternative strategy, involving an international collaboration between programme developers in America and England to create a programme that is specific to the English foster care context. The group-based programme, called TEND, contains intervention strategies that are based on social learning theory (Price et a., 2009) and that many studies have previously proven to be effective; however, in developing the TEND programme, it was also necessary to consider the how these concepts may be understood in terms of attachment theory (which is an influential model in England), and in terms of the specific demographics (age, education) of English foster carers. In this presentation, we will describe the process by which TEND was developed and implemented, and describe the programme components and intervention strategies.
References
Dozier, M., Lindhiem, O., & Ackerman, J. P. (2005). Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up: An Intervention Targeting Empirically Identified Needs of Foster Infants.
Fisher, P. A., & Gilliam, K. S. (2012). Multidimensional treatment foster care: An alternative to residential treatment for high risk children and adolescents. Psychosocial Intervention, 21(2), 195-203.
Fisher, P. A., Gunnar, M. R., Dozier, M., Bruce, J., & Pears, K. C. (2006). Effects of therapeutic interventions for foster children on behavioral problems, caregiver attachment, and stress regulatory neural systems. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094(1), 215-225.
Price, J. M., Chamberlain, P., Landsverk, J., & Reid, J. (2009). KEEP foster‐parent training intervention: Model description and effectiveness. Child & Family Social Work, 14(2), 233-242.
Roberts, R. (2007). A new approach to meeting the needs of looked after children experiencing difficulties: The Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care in England Project. AMACH Occasional Papers, (26), 59-68.
Shonkoff, J. P., Boyce, W. T., & McEwen, B. S. (2009). Neuroscience, molecular biology, and the childhood roots of health disparities: building a new framework for health promotion and disease prevention. Jama, 301(21), 2252-2259.
