New Foster Care Research from the Casey Foundation

Foster Care Can Spark Modest Improvements in Child Well-Being, New Research Shows

Posted July 1, 2016, By the Annie E. Casey Foundation

For decades, communities have intervened to help children who have been abused and neglected, even without clear data to know which interventions, if any, have worked. According to new research from Kids Insight, a nonprofit grantee of the Casey Foundation, the well-being of many children in foster care  improves while in custody. However, a minority of kids still struggle and agencies need to find innovative approaches to effectively meet their needs.

Kids Insight used the Treatment Outcome Package (TOP) questionnaire, an assessment tool on child well-being, in Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina and Delaware to measure how kids, on average, were doing when they entered care compared to how they were faring at defined points after spending time in care.

“The insights provided by TOP are pretty amazing,” says Tracey Feild, director of Casey's Child Welfare Strategy Group. “While improvements are small, they exist and in many cases are statistically significant.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Former Pastor Marries Science, Bible Studies to Heal Wounds of Childhood Trauma

It wasn’t your everyday experience, hearing Bible verses mixed with particulars from epidemiology and neurobiology in the same breath. But that’s what Dave Lockridge was doing as the 20 people in his Monday night ACE Overcomers class at Gateway Community Church in Merced, CA, busily scribbled in their workbooks.

Lockridge – a grandfather, former pastor and businessman – is executive director of ACE Overcomers, an organization he created to provide programs to “overcome addiction, depression, anxiety, and anger caused by a childhood filled with abuse, neglect and household dysfunction.”

He was pastor of a small church in nearby Atwater, CA, when his wife, Susan, director of medical staff services for Mercy Medical Center of Merced, invited a guest speaker to describe the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Adverse Childhood Experience Study (ACE Study). That got him thinking about the lifelong consequences of childhood trauma. What sealed his fate was a speech by Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-founder of the ACE Study, at a meeting sponsored by the Family Resource Council of Merced a year later, in 2005. Felitti did a presentation about his groundbreaking epidemiological research project, and related neurobiological research.

After Felitti’s presentation, Lockridge realized that in his efforts to help his most troubled parishioners, he’d been doing everything wrong. He decided that he needed to do something about it, not only for himself, but for other clergy.

“Over more than 20 years, I’ve buried way too many 35-year-olds and 40-year-olds who should have lived longer,” he says. “That’s what motivated me — the fact that I could go 20 years in the ministry and be ignorant about this.”

“This” was the research showing that early childhood trauma causes much of the adult onset of chronic disease in the U.S.

Read the full article HERE

www.acestoohigh.com

Adoption Research Project

Kate Sweeney is a sociologist from Purdue University Calumet conducting research on adoption choices. She's looking for parents who have adopted children to take part in a research project. Participants need to identify as white, have adopted one or more children domestically or internationally in the past 5 years, and live in the greater Chicago metro-area. The interview will take about 45 minutes to an hour and includes questions about your adopted child or children and the adoption process. Information from the interview will be confidential, meaning all identifying factors will be changed along with your name. If you are interested in participating in the study, please contact Kate Sweeney.

Kathryn A. Sweeney, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Department of Behavioral Sciences
Purdue University Calumet
kathryn.sweeney@purduecal.edu

Adoption Works Well: a Synthesis of the Literature

The following, is an interesting report published by the Marriage & Religion Research Institute (www.marrifrc.org).



by Dr. Patrick F. Fagan

Adopted children benefit significantly from adoption. Many experience a dramatic improvement in socioeconomic status and move into materially advantaged homes and to the care of supportive, educated, adoptive parents who are very interested in all aspects of their child's development. The majority of adopted children live in small families in early childhood, which is to their advantage. Compared to even long-term fostering, adoption provides a greater sense of permanence and familial belonging, more emotional security, and a more lasting psychosocial foundation for life.

A number of major research projects, literature overviews, and meta-analyses attest to the overall benefit of adoption.......

To read to complete report, click http://www.frc.org/researchsynthesis/adoption-works-well-a-synthesis-of-the-literature.