Equipping Foster Parents

Implications
The results of the literature demonstrate implications for best practice and improving how professionals can ease the strain on foster parents. Foster parents are in a role where they are required to frequently engage with children who have experienced crisis need additional training and support (Taylor-Richardson, Heflinger, & Brown, 2006). Children coming out of crisis often externalize their trauma through emotional and behavioral responses, child welfare professionals should be effectively preparing foster parents to experience these behaviors and to cope with the experience. These implications place responsibility on the professional to properly prepare foster parents for their role and inform them of the risks as well as strategies to minimize risk of compassion fatigue.
In regards to training, child welfare services professionals should be equipping foster parents for the specifics their roles require. For example when placing children in foster care with disabilities caseworkers should recruit parents that have
When foster parents have had their own traumatic experiences in the the past they are more vulnerable to compassion fatigue (Meyers, 2002). In addition to background information professionals should analyze foster parents’ coping style prior to becoming foster parents to see if they would be a good fit for the program and capable of managing their stress (Vanderfaeillie, Robberechts, Vanschoonlandt, Van Holen, & De Maeyer, 2015). If the assessment reveals weaknesses in coping strategies case managers will be better prepared to work through those weaknesses while the foster parents have a child. Failure to properly train foster parents can lead to maltreatment or neglect of the child in care as the parent is too fatigued to properly care for the child (Jones & Morrissette,