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Today, child welfare agencies widely endorse a family-centered approach to foster care casework. This approach centers on a collaborative parent—caseworker relationship as a mechanism for maintaining parents' engagement in services and presumes that continued engagement will propel parents toward reunification. However, despite the importance of engaging parents, parents of children in foster care are understudied. The existing literature offers little insight into parents' experiences of the foster care process, and even less in terms of quantitative analysis of parent engagement. The present study addresses this research gap by testing a new measure of parent engagement. The 46 parents of children in foster care in the study sample were mostly female, either black or Hispanic, and at the time of study had an average open case length of 30 months. The piloted measure showed good reliability. Results suggest that parent engagement is significantly negatively related to distance from the parent's home to the child welfare agency and length of time the parent spent working with his or her longest running caseworker. Implications for further measure development and directions for future research on parents of children in foster care are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of child protection literature focuses on termination of parental rights, family reunification, and children's re-entry into care as outcomes for children in foster care. Studies have investigated child, placement, family, and parent variables as predictors of case outcome. However, one important group of variables remains largely unstudied: factors related to parents’ service experience. Parents’ service experience includes parents’ perceptions of and involvement in the various services in which they must participate in order to recover their children from foster care (e.g. mandated treatment programmes such as substance abuse rehabilitation, parenting skills classes, etc.). The parental perspective on the foster care process is a critical element in the life of a child protection case, and its influence on case outcome must be explored. A brief review of the current literature on case outcome predictors is provided and parents’ service experience is highlighted as an area in need of investigation. Suggestions for the measurement of parents’ service experience are also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]