5:44 p.m., April 25, 2008--More than 30 employees from child welfare agencies from around the world attended a weeklong workshop in intervention methods for youth foster care held April 14-18 in the Perkins Student Center at UD.

Organized by Mary Dozier, Amy E. du Pont Chair in Child Development and professor of psychology at UD, along with colleagues in the Infant-Caregiver Lab at the University, the weeklong course focused on intervention methods and ways clinicians can implement these methods in foster care settings.

“Over the past decade, I've been developing the intervention that we're training clinicians in,” said Dozier, “and as the intervention was developed in Delaware, it made sense to bring people here.”

Clinicians and supervisors from public and private agencies from as far away as Norway, Scotland, Australia, Canada and California attended, Dozier added, and their tuition will be paid for through funding provided by welfare agencies and foundations.

Since 1998, Dozier and UD's Infant-Caregiver Lab have been developing an intervention program called “Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up” for youth in the child welfare system, and in 2006, UD's Infant Caregiver Project was awarded a $3.3 million grant by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for a 5-year research project focusing on services and skills for high-risk families in Philadelphia.

Dozier said that those attending the workshop at UD heard her talk about the development of the intervention and then heard Sandra Sepulveda Kozakowski, an assistant professor in child development at UD and a former doctoral student of Dozier's, talk about implementing the intervention methods.

Over the course of the intervention program's development, NIMH has funded studies testing its efficacy, and it was found to enhance attachment, behavioral and biological outcomes for young children in foster care. Additional funding from Edna Bennett Pierce has allowed dissemination of the intervention methods to staff working with children in foster care settings around the world.

“In our lab, we study the adjustment of infants and young children who have experienced maltreatment and disruptions in their relationships with caregivers,” Dozier said. “Over the past 10 years, we have developed a training program that targets the needs of these young children.”

The efficacy of this intervention is continuing to be assessed in a randomized clinical trial, Dozier said, and she and colleagues are studying a range of outcomes, the attachments that children form with their caregivers and their ability to regulate physiology, behavior and emotions.

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photos by Tyler Jacobson, AS '06