University of Delaware
Office of Public Relations
The Messenger
Vol. 6, No. 1/1996
Program designed to improve relationships in foster care

     A television news story in 1991 inspired Mary Dozier,
associate professor of psychology, to begin research that may
eventually benefit foster children.
     In the story, a 2-year-old girl who had been in a foster
family's care since shortly after her birth was being moved to
another foster family who shared her ethnicity. The move was done
at her biological mother's request.
     Seeing the story made Dozier question how attachments the
child had formed would complicate the move.
     "Attachment issues are the key development task in infancy,"
Dozier says. "The more secure a relationship between child and
caregiver is, the more positive the effect on the child," she
explains. Because a foster child's relationship with his or her
foster parents is tenuous and often short-lived, the task becomes
that much harder for him or her.
     In 1996, Dozier received a $1 million grant from the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop a program
for foster parents designed to help them understand and improve
the behaviors of foster children.
     "Foster children probably unknowingly develop strategies
that push people away," Dozier says, including the inability to
develop a secure, trusting relationship with a caregiver,
ineffective problem-solving skills and behavior problems.
     By considering foster parents as "treatment providers,"
instead of simply a family and home for a child, Dozier says she
hopes to improve the foster child's outlook. Dozier hypothesizes
that if the foster family understands the behavior of the foster
child, it will encourage the child to rely on the family.
     Thanks to the Delaware Division of Family Services and the
Department of Social Services in Baltimore, the program is now in
place in New Castle and Kent counties in Delaware and in
Baltimore, but its effectiveness
has yet to be assessed.
     The program works to inform foster parents about strategies
that foster children may use to cope with their histories of "non-
optimal caregiving," Dozier explains. "Foster children are apt to
appear as if they do not need caregivers or that caregivers are
unable to soothe them. Our intervention helps foster parents
become aware that their babies need them, regardless of how they
act.
     "For example, if a baby hurts himself and does not go to the
foster parent for nurturing, the foster parent is likely to
assume she is unneeded.
     "We help her to recognize that the baby does need her but
has learned that he cannot count on anyone. Therefore, the foster
mother must let the baby know time and time again that she is
there, that she'll love him when he's hurt, scared, sick or just
feeling fussy."
     Dozier conducts her research in a variety of ways, including
interviews with foster and biological parents, videotaping
situations in the home and observing children at play to see how
they get along with each other and receiving reports about
children's behavior from their teachers.
     Using this information, Dozier and her graduate students
"assess the effectiveness of their intervention on parental
sensitivity, child-caregiver relationship quality and child
behavioral and emotional problems," Dozier says.
     Though her research was inspired by one, small girl in a
brief news story, many foster children may benefit from Dozier's
work, feeling more secure in their foster-care situations and
later, in their adult lives.
                                -Jennifer Bevan, Delaware '97