Meadows Psychology Service are excited to be getting involved in Foster Care Fortnight 2024.
How we support Foster Carers – Training
At Meadows Psychology Service, we have specialist psychological therapists who work with children and young people who have been fostered, alongside their fostering family and support systems. Our expertise lies in working with care experienced children and we work through an attachment and trauma informed lens. We love the work we do with a number of fostering services across the country providing a range of psychological services, one of which is our training courses for foster carers.
This Foster Care Fortnight we want to celebrate the training courses that we run with the most committed, caring, motivated, and resourceful carers of children who have often experienced significant trauma. We deliver a variety of training courses to foster carers, but two of our most popular courses are Foundations for Attachment and Nurturing Attachments. These courses have been developed specifically for carers of children who have experienced early trauma and are endorsed by the DDP Institute.
Foundations for Attachment:
This is a six-session programme to help the amazing parents and carers we work with to nurture attachments with their child. It is specifically designed for those caring for children whose ability to emotionally connect to carers has been compromised as a result of attachment problems, trauma, and loss or separation.
This training consists of three core areas:
- Understanding the Challenges of Parenting
- How to parent therapeutically
- Looking After Yourself
Nurturing Attachments:
The Nurturing attachments training looks slightly deeper into the topics explored within the Foundations for Attachment training. This 18-session groupwork programme has its foundation in an understanding of child development, and the impact of developmental trauma on children. The programme includes an understanding of how attachment and carer/child relationships form so that children can experience safety and security in their attachment relationships.
This programme is split into three modules:
- Module 1: Providing an understanding of attachment theory and what therapeutic parenting looks like
- Module 2: Introducing the ‘House Model of Parenting’ and thinking about how a child can experience carers as a secure base
- Module 3: Supporting carers to use the ‘House Model of Parenting’ to build relationships with children and young people, whilst helping to manage behaviour that challenges
All in all, the foster care training offered by MPS provides caregivers with the tools they need to navigate challenging situations, such as helping children express their emotions in healthier ways and fostering resilience. We know that the parents and foster carers we work with are committed to the best for their children and young people; we love getting to know all of the amazing, dedicated people that come to learn with us.
Our goal is to empower foster carers with the knowledge and skills necessary to provide the highest quality of care for children with complex emotional needs, ultimately contributing to their emotional health and wellbeing development within a nurturing family environment.
Our courses are offered from our therapy bases across the country. The outcomes measured after carers have attended the training are extremely positive…
- There was a clinically significant improvement in carers overall competence and ability to therapeutically parent, their perceived level of relationship experience with their child, and their ability to engage in reflective practice! (PRF-Q & PSOC)
- Overall, all carers also showed clinically significant improvement in their scores measuring their understanding of therapeutic parenting skills, the quality of their parent-child relationship, responsiveness to their young person’s needs, and placement stability!
Some feedback we have received from carers so far…
- “The insights into behaviours and strategies are really useful, it helps you to see what’s going on underneath”
- “I’ve got more confidence since being in the group, I felt really enclosed from my childhood experiences and the group has helped”
- “When you’ve been a foster carer for so long, you need this to remember what you’ve got right and what you haven’t got right”
- “I feel lighter after the training, I feel like I’ve shared”
- “I wish we’d done this training earlier. You get taught about being a foster carer, but you don’t get taught how to be a good foster carer. This has given us approaches to use. Now we understand the shield of shame which relates to a lot of our young person’s behaviours.”
- “The course is a bit of therapy for everyone, it brings you back to basics of why you do it”
- “It helps to hear others experiences”
- “Everyone should have to do this training within a few months of being a carer”
Contact us today through our online form to find out more about our work with foster families.
