Helping parents build relationships with those in their care

As a professional who supports families (kinship, foster, or adoptive), your role likely involves helping parents improve their relationships with the children or youth in their care. That work may happen before placement, in a new placement’s early days, or even down the road, after family challenges have resulted in frayed connections.  

Relationship-building requires special skills and focused attention, especially when at least one of the parties involved has experienced trauma and loss. A child’s early experiences may affect their ability to trust, their behaviors, and even their worldview. Caregivers may struggle to overcome unrealistic expectations, their own experiences with grief and loss, and a societal belief that love alone can make everything work smoothly.  

As a support professional, you can help parents build important solid connections with youth while acknowledging and addressing these challenges. Below are some strategies to help.  

Bolster what is taught in pre-service training.

Pre-service training aims to ensure that caregivers understand their role and know how to respond to the challenges that may come from parenting those who have experienced trauma and loss. But the depth and quality of training may vary across sites, agencies, and even families. As a professional, you can review what your region’s pre-service training covers and look for ways to address potential gaps.  

Does the training emphasize the importance of building relationships? Does it teach trauma-responsive parenting? Or was training waived for the parents you’re supporting? 

If a caregiver’s training didn’t cover these key areas, you may want to consider having them visit the National Training and Development Curriculum for Foster and Adoptive Parents (NTDC) website. This free curriculum is available to help parents grasp these important concepts. Seek out other trainings to address gaps, and consider speaking with your leadership about ways to strengthen future pre-service trainings.  

Pay attention to the transition.

For families in the early stages of a foster care or adoption placement, professionals can help prioritize the relationship before the child or youth even comes home. Parents may be too excited, too stressed, or too focused on logistics to remember to also consider the importance of building connections at that time. They may forget how entering a new home and family might be hard for a child or youth and affect their ability to connect.  

Talk to parents about how they will help their child or youth become a member of their family. Suggestions might include: 

You can find more such suggestions in this blog post from AdoptUSKids, Helping children build attachment.   

Help parents and youth understand each other’s personalities and values.

Even those family members who share several interests may have different personality styles that affect their relationships. Many of us have taken personality tests as part of workplace team-building efforts, but how often do we apply these same concepts to our family?  

You can help parents and youth take personality quizzes (such as this True Colors test, available in PDF form from Hampton University) and work with them to identify ways to accommodate identified differences.  

But this work extends beyond personalities. Children and parents may hold different values and belief systems, especially when youth join the family at an older age.  

As a professional, you can guide parents to acknowledge, discuss, and even embrace these differences. On the Families Rising website, adoptee and child welfare professional Nathan Ross provides parents advice in his article, Our stories shape our attachment, saying, “Honor requests as long as they are reasonable and do no harm. Remember that your child may have different beliefs or values than you. By respecting their reasonable choices, you are helping them better understand who they are and what they believe.” 

Consider parents’ attachment styles.

In addition to understanding personalities and values, it’s important for professionals to help parents explore and understand their own attachment styles and how they may differ from those in their care. The types of attachment styles include:  

You can learn more from the Cleveland Clinic’s site about the four identified attachment styles. 

When you’re working with families struggling to build relationships, identifying family members’ different attachment styles and addressing how to incorporate that new knowledge into creating connections can be a big help. These downloadable videos and handouts from the National Training and Development Curriculum (NTDC) module about attachment can be a useful resource.  

Help both parties address loss and grief.

This article from the Families Rising website addresses how loss and grief are two of the seven core issues in adoption and permanency, affecting all members of the adoption constellation. They’re equally important for foster and kinship families, too. 

Children and youth have lost their first families and often a connection to their culture or community of origin. They may have been separated from friends, neighbors, pets, and others who were important to them. Many resource parents have experienced infertility, and those who are experiencing challenges often feel the loss of the life they expected.  

Professionals can help parents and youth identify, acknowledge, and grieve their losses. One model available for helping on this front is Dr. Darla Henry’s 3-5-7 model, outlined on the Families Rising website. The 3-5-7 model assists parents or professionals in guiding children or youth through understanding their losses and rebuilding their relationships.    

Although they are designed for parent support groups, professionals can also use these two discussion guides, available from AdoptUSKids as PDFs, to help individual families address both child and parental grief and loss: 

Help parents prioritize connection before correction.

In discussions with parents both before and after placement, professionals particularly need to emphasize connection before correction. You can learn more about this In a three-and-a-half minute YouTube video from 4KIDSUS. Many parents need to be reminded that when choosing between arguing over chores and letting something go so that they can build relationship, they should almost always choose the relationship!  

Help parents think about relationship-based options for the things that can become arguments in many families. If there are chores to be done, can they do them together? Perhaps the child can tell the parent a story as they make the bed together. Can they find a way to turn homework into a game the parent and youth play together (such as hosting an at-home spelling bee)?  

One element of getting past the need for correction can be accepting and living through difficult moments. Professionals can work with parents to develop their own strategies for what Dr. Mona Delahooke calls mindful acceptance, which can be explored more thoroughly in this blog post on her website. With mindful acceptance, parents work on staying calm rather than responding to their child’s behaviors, improving their own state of mind and perhaps preventing any escalation that might damage the relationship.  

Another potential opportunity for connecting is for parents to apologize when they have not been their best self. Remind parents that it’s helpful to say sorry to those in their care when they’ve done something that caused hurt.   

Focus on family-based solutions.

Ask parents to consider family-based solutions to challenges, as focusing on child-only interventions can cause unintentional harm. Parents often want to find a particular medication or therapy to fix the child and ask for your help to change their child or youth’s actions.   

You can help parents understand that children heal best in the safety of a secure relationship, and that addressing family dynamics rather than individual issues can be hugely helpful. Help them seek therapy or counseling interventions that address the family system. You can also use this factsheet PDF from the Child Welfare Information Gateway to offer parents tips for finding adoption-competent mental health practitioners.  

Perhaps most importantly, you can help parents understand that most often they may need to make changes to how they parent to achieve their desired outcome. Parents may need to change routines or parenting strategies as they raise youth who have experienced trauma and loss. You can help caregivers understand that consequence-based parenting can damage relationships. Professionals can make a profound difference by helping parents embrace trauma-responsive parenting, which you can explore further in this webinar from AdoptUSKids.  

Encourage parents to spend one-on-one time with their children.

All families can benefit from planning special connection days—time when the parent or parents spend time with just one child. In an AdoptUSKids webinar, adoptive parent and child welfare professional Barb Clark offers advice to share with parents and shares strategies, such as those below.  

Clark explains her philosophy when planning these connection days with her daughter, saying, “It’s all about her. She gets to make the choices even if I don’t like them.” This is great advice to share with the parents you serve. 

Develop the families’ support network.

Having a strong support network allows parents that one-on-one time and to be more focused when they need to devote time to relationship building. Learn more from the National Center for Enhanced Post-Adoption Support’s PDF guide about how you can play a key role in helping parents develop their personal support networks and connect to community-based services.  

For example, you may help parents identify supports they didn’t know they had. Brainstorm options with them, including friends, teachers, former daycare providers, former foster parents, coaches, the child’s birth family members, and others who might be willing to help. Ask them to consider if a few friends or family members might come together to jointly care for a child or sibling group whose behaviors seem too challenging for just one person. Don’t forget to ask the child or youth if there is someone in their life they would like to see more often. Parents may be able to bring that person into the family’s support network.

Talk with parents about their unmet expectations.

Research has shown that unmet parental expectations can lead to relationship challenges and even placement disruptions. Professionals can help parents, both before and after placement, examine their assumptions and then develop more realistic ideas regarding expectations for those in their care.   

Explore with parents what is frustrating them. Encourage them to consider whether those expectations that can’t be met can instead be changed. For example, one adoptive parent said she expected her family to eat dinner together at the dining room table. She realized over time that sitting still in that environment was too hard for some of her children, so they chose to eat in the family room. With this new expectation, everyone was still together, and stress was greatly reduced.  

Professionals can also help parents adjust expectations by discussing the lifelong impact of trauma and exploring their children’s developmental age. Both of these concepts are explained further in the AdoptUSKids blog post, How family support professionals can encourage trauma-responsive parenting. 

Include the child or teen when finding solutions.

It’s important to include the child or youth in any efforts to improve family relationships. Ask them what challenges they are experiencing and what they’d like to see their parent(s) do better or differently. Understanding the difficulties from multiple angles can help you authentically diagnose the problem and find effective solutions. Encourage parents to learn about Dr. Ross Greene’s collaborative problem solving, which is thoroughly presented in a series of videos and articles on his website. This approach guides parents and children through working together to clarify and address their unsolved challenges. (Of particular note is the first video, under step three, which you can find at the link above, which offers great advice about how parents can adjust expectations and help stabilize their relationships.) 

Clearly articulate the difference between equitable and fair.

Clashes between siblings can also affect a youth’s relationship with their parents.  

Help parents recognize the importance of explaining how the concepts of equitable and fair differ. Brainstorm ideas together that might work for each child, and let parents practice with you. For example, if the child who is complaining about fairness has their own needs the parent is accommodating, they can work with that, saying, “You know how you sleep with a special blanket? We do that for you because it helps you. We do X and Y to help your brother because that’s what he needs. He doesn’t need a blanket to sleep.” If you can’t help parents come up with an example in their own family, consider using a story of a child who needs glasses or a wheelchair or a teen who can’t hear. Most children can understand this type of difference needs to be accommodated and then can understand how some challenges aren’t visible. Many people have found the equality vs. equity graphic near the top of this article by the San Diego Foundation to be a useful teaching tool for children and adults alike. Teachers on the resource website Better Kids share numerous examples of how they have taught about fairness, which can lead to increased empathy, thus improving relationships overall.  

Address trust and care blockages.

A child’s blocked trust and a parents’ blocked care can be significant barriers to successful relationships. Blocked trust happens when a youth’s early life experiences demonstrate that adults can’t be counted on. Then, when parents are repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts to connect with a child, they may develop blocked care, feeling as if they are failures or inadequate.  

Support professionals can help parents learn to identify blocked care and work to overcome it. Below are a few resources that may be of use to you as you work with parents and that you can share with the families you’re serving. 

Connect caregivers with experienced resource parents.

As a professional, you can’t do it all. Connect parents with experienced caregivers who have a deep understanding of how to build relationships with those coping with trauma and loss. The best advice can come from someone who has lived expertise. Before you make any connections, though, ensure the recommended caregivers focus on relationships and use trauma-responsive parenting. 

If you don’t have a formal mentoring program or support group in your area, can you find a way to offer a periodic coaching session for parents? Perhaps you can arrange a virtual or in-person series of gatherings, ideally led by a parent/professional. Parents could come with specific questions and get possible solutions. Between meetings, families could try the new strategies and then come back to discuss what worked and what didn’t in a future session. 

Acknowledge the very real challenges parents face.

It’s important for professionals to be aware of the difficulties parents may face as they try to build a stronger relationship with their child. They may experience: 

Respond with empathy as you help them overcome any shame or blame they may be feeling. Remind them that relationships take time and they may have to try multiple ways to make a connection before they have a breakthrough.  

Learn more.

Many of the relationship-building strategies are explored in the AdoptUSKids webinar, Supporting parents to overcome relationship barriers.