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Adoptive families are part of the landscape of family diversity that characterizes contemporary societies. As in many other places, adoption in Portugal has recently undergone profound changes. In the past, adoption involved mainly babies with no history of early adversity and life in the adoptive family resembled conventional family life. In contrast, children are adopted in Portugal at an average age of 4 and after experiences of neglect and abuse in the family followed by institutional rearing. Overcoming the emotional and behavioural difficulties linked to these early adverse trajectories can be as challenging for the adoptee as it is for adopters to respond to the child’s needs and build new family relationships. Together with many positive experiences, adoption also brings stress and difficulties. Research on these matters in Portugal is currently very limited, with little or no response to some key questions. How do the emotional bonds that sustain family relationships emerge and unfold? How do problems emerge and develop? What are the main sources of satisfaction and stress for these families Where do they go for advice and support? How do things change as the adoptee reaches adolescence or approaches independence? How do adoption professionals respond to postadoption families’ needs? What difficulties do adoption professionals face in their practice? This research project - funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (PTDC/SOC-ASO/4158/2020) - aims to provide in-depth knowledge on the post-adoption trajectories of Portuguese families and to establish solid foundations for the urgently needed and non-existent post adoption services. Adoption professionals, psychologists and social workers need this information to be aware of the needs of these families and to be able to respond effectively to their difficulties. The impetus and inspiration of this project partly comes from knowledge on adoption instability and breakdown. In Portugal, about one out of 15 preadoption placements is disrupted. In Europe, at least one out of 25 adoptions fails. International data show that around 1 in 4 adoptions go through major difficulties that threaten stability and permanence. This is not what children in need of a new family for life deserve and is not what adopters expect and want for their new family. Research is needed in Portugal to document the extent and timing of postadoption pathways and difficulties, as well as to establish a system to monitor children’s and families’ changing needs, so that effective support can be provided when necessary. These are the main goals of this research project. To achieve these purposes a cross sequential design is proposed, inspired by research on adoption instability and breakdown showing the relevance of both the child’s age at placement and the time-related changes thereafter. Three cohorts of 90 children each, adopted in 2013, 2016 and 2019, will be followed for three years with data collection times 12 months apart. Each cohort will include children adopted at ages 0-2, 3-5 and 6-10 (30 children per group), ensuring a final age-span of adoptees between 2 and 20 years. All adoption professionals across Portugal will be also invited to participate in the study.Through the established collaboration with the Institute of Social Security (ISS), families meeting the selection criteria will be identified and professionals will be recruited. Data will be collected online, using adopters and professionals as informants. In T2, data from a representative sub sample of 90 families will also be collected at in-home visits to cross-validate online data. The contents to be explored and the instruments to be used are within the expertise of the research team. Like the tools developed in other countries, a user-friendly online monitoring and follow-up system will be set up. Families will be provided with feedback and educational resources to keep them involved in the study. Those struggling with more intense difficulties will be referred to specialized services through a geo-referencing system. Moreover, in an innovative process of dissemination of findings and organized in collaboration with ISS, annual sessions with adoption professionals will provide the opportunity to share ongoing findings and design new services. The novel outcomes of the project pertain to three different domains. First, basic research. Adoption research in Portugal is still incipient, devoted only to some very specific issues and lacking an effort of wider breath and ambition, more in line with international research and with a social services perspective. Second, knowledge transfer. Since these families are formed through the child welfare system, the responsibility of the system is not only to form, but also to sustain them. For this, Portuguese child protection needs sound information about the changing needs of these families and the social and professional resources required to appropriately meet them. Third, development of professional tools. Postadoption follow -up in Portugal is now at best fragmentary and irregular. Adoption professionals need a well-established protocol that permits monitoring these children and families so as to be able to identify their needs and respond to them timely and efficiently.

The present scoping review aims to outline the main features of vulnerable families engaged with welfare services and referred to a parenting intervention. Preventing child maltreatment and any other adverse outcome that may hinder children's developmental or psychological well-being is a joint effort for welfare systems, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers. A consistent amount of evidence shows that poor, negative, and dysfunctional parental practices significantly impact children's well-being and that supporting parents through parenting interventions has many positive outcomes for children and also families' well-being. While being so fruitful, however, the field of research lacks a defined shared conceptualization of "vulnerable families" involved and targeted by parenting interventions and this may ultimately limit the potential of research outcomes and the implementation of parenting programs in real-world settings. The objective of the present work is, consequently, to map features, risk factors, and possibly protective factors, according to the ecological framework, of at-risk families who have received parenting programs, in an effort to characterize them from a child protection perspective. The knowledge retrieved would be informative for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, sustaining their effort to protect children's rights and promote their well-being and psycho-social adjustment. The present scoping review will follow the six-step framework provided by Arksey and O’Malley (2005), subsequently improved by Levac and collegues (2010) and ultimately developed by the Joanna Briggs Institute (Peters et al., 2020), and the guidelines by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Met Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR; Tricco et al., 2018). The PCC mnemonic (Population, Concept, Context) details the inclusion criteria and involves families considered at-risk, already engaged with social services (or analogue services) and directed to a parenting intervention, with children between 2 and 18 years old.

Parenting programs are important tools for working with families of children with disabilities. This protocol intends to show the procedures of a scoping review, which aims to identify, describe and to analyze evidence-based parenting programs for parents of children with disabilities, highlighting those that address coparenting, in order to show consistent evidence and existing gaps. Following are the six stages originally proposed by Arksey & O'Malley; Levac et al., and the Joana Briggs Institute (IJB) which are: 1-Identify the study question; that this research was guided by the mnemonic PCC (Population-Concept-Context) generating the question: How do evidence-based parenting programs for parents of children with disabilities address co-parenting?; 2- identify relevant studies; 3-selection of studies; 4- map the data; 5- gather, summarize and report the results; and 6- consultation. Extended PRISMA Items for Scope Review (PRISMA-ScR) will be used, and the results presented through a narrative synthesis. The scoping review will assist in conducting a research, mapping parenting programs delivered to families of children with disabilities, highlighting those that are part of the co-parenting subsystem, in order to make it more evident as to its importance for family adaptation and well-being.

An instrument, available in European Portuguese, to assess parents’ feeding practices among parents of children aged 5 to 10.

An instrument to assess physical activity parenting practices in parents of 5 to 10 years-old children

The rates of childhood overweight (OW) and obesity (OB) significantly increased in the past decades. The prevalence of children with OW and OB (OW/OB children) in Portugal is one of the highest in the European Union and in the OECD area. A comprehensive approach to prevent and treat childhood OW and OB is needed. Since parents have a crucial role in children's diet and physical activity, interventions should include the family's lifestyle and focus on the parenting practices. Programs targeting parents by increasing parents' awareness and responsibility in providing environments that lead children to healthy behaviors are imperative in the treatment of childhood OW and OB. Considering the beneficial effects of parents as agents of change in pediatric weight management, this study's purpose is to implement and evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of Group Lifestyle Triple P (GLTP) in a Portuguese sample of parents of OW/OB children. This is particularly relevant as, to date, there are no such structured interventions available in Portugal. GLTP is the only evidenced-based program that teaches parents of children with OW (not only with OB) to use positive parenting in order to promote a healthy lifestyle in their families, through healthy eating and physical activity. It stems from the Triple P - Positive Parenting Program, and targets parents of OW/OB children aged 5 to 10 through a 14-session intervention. It aims to decrease child's weight and weight-related problem behavior, by increasing parents' self-efficacy in managing the child's behavior, and by decreasing the use of ineffective parenting practices. To accomplish the study's purposes, a RCT with parents of OW and OB children and a change process analysis will be conducted. The outcome variables include the child's anthropometric measures and weight-related problem behavior, parents' self-efficacy in managing the child's weight-related problem, parental feeding style, parenting practices, parental self-regulation, and parental perception of change. A total of 120 parents of OW/OB children, aged 5 to 10, will be recruited from the Nutrition Unit of the Pediatric Department (NUPD) of Porto University Central Hospital (Centro Materno-Infantil do Norte, CMIN). Participants will be randomly allocated to the experimental and control conditions. Control condition includes treatment as usual in the health care services. The study will include three assessment waves (pre-test, post-test and 6-month follow-up). Participants of the control group will have the opportunity to receive the intervention after the RCT evaluation. With this study we expect to obtain knowledge on the effectiveness of GLTP as secondary prevention tool of childhood OW and OB, contributing to the development of public health and health care policies and to a decrease of the significant health care costs inherent to childhood OW and OB.

Here are presented the data reported in the manuscript "Narrative abilities and episodic memory in school-aged children followed by Child Protective Services" by Salomão, Canário, and Cruz, published as part of the Special Issue Mental Health and Well-Being in Children (https://doi.org/10.3390/children8100849) available at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/children/special_issues/Mental_Health_and_Well-being_in_Children. The results described in the manuscript were estimated with the dataset available in the files folder. The dataset is available as SPSS data file (.sav).

The evidence-based practice has spun evaluation needs in psychosocial interventions across a wide diversity of service areas. For family and parenting evidence-based programs have increasingly noticed the importance of evaluation strategies that respect the essentiality and goals of such practices. Among a number of issues involved in evaluation from informative to formative, outcomes and impact at a short and long term, all of them have challenged the transfer of scientific research into practice. In this paper, the authors briefly discuss approaches and hot topics for scientists, practitioners and policy-makers. As psychoeducational and social interventions become resourceful prevention instruments have also absorbed the principles and goals of prevention science, particularly critical for an extensive implementation of an evidence base of practices across services. However, the transference of evidence-based research into practice is filled with controversies that have fed a continuous dialogue among supporters of experimental designs and constructionism paradigms. Concretely, the conference will present arguments for the use of an evidence- based framework in the variety of family and parenting interventions. We will resume the principal theoretical positions and methodological prompts of influential researchers in the field and illustrate how these assumptions are embedded in known and reputable family and parenting programs in the European context, by a systematic review of all available evidence on evaluation strategies in family and parenting support programmes. We will end by pointing out a short list of principles and criteria of an evidence-based evaluation proposal.

Este estudo tem como objetivo analisar a expressividade emocional nas narrativas das crianças maltratadas e não maltratadas. Participaram, nesta investigação, 100 crianças, entre os 5 e os 8 anos. Destas, 50 sofreram experiências de mau-trato e encontravam-se institucionalizadas, enquanto as restantes 50 não sofreram mau-trato e viviam com a família biológica. Foi apresentado às crianças um conjunto de seis inícios de histórias, que lhes era pedido para completar. A intensidade da expressividade emocional da criança e da expressividade atribuída às personagens, bem como a coerência entre ambas, foi analisada com base no Sistema para Codificar as Emoções na Attachment Story Completation Task. Foram, também, avaliadas a competência cognitiva verbal e não-verbal das crianças. Não foi observado um efeito do mau-trato na expressividade emocional, mas foi observado um efeito estatisticamente significativo da competência cognitiva não-verbal na expressividade emocional negativa da criança. Os resultados deste estudo apontam para a existência de semelhanças entre os dois grupos de crianças e contribuem para a compreensão do desenvolvimento emocional de crianças provenientes de populações de risco. This study aims at analyzing emotional expressiveness in the narratives of maltreated and nonmaltreated children. A hundred children aged between 5 and 8 years old have participated in this study: 50 have been maltreated and were institutionalized, while the other 50 have not suffered maltreatment and lived with their biological families. Children were asked to complete a set of six story-stems. The intensity of the character’s emotional expressiveness, as well as the coherence between them, was analysed with Emotions Coding System in the Attachment Story Completation Task. Children’s verbal and nonverbal cognitive competence was also assessed. There was no significant effect of maltreatment on emotional expressiveness, but a statistical significant effect of the nonverbal cognitive competence on children’s negative emotional expression was observed. These results highlight the existence of similarities between the two groups of children and contribute to understand emotional development in children from risk populations.