Family Minds: A Short-Term Psychoeducational Intervention Increases Mentalizing Skills in Foster Parents

Background and Purpose

Mentalization typically develops within the context of a secure, attached relationship and involves the ability to understand behavior in relation to mental states such as thoughts and feelings.  One area not given much consideration when training foster parents is their state of mind regarding attachment or their capacity to mentalize.  What little research has been done in this area indicates foster parents might have higher rates of insecure attachment states of mind compared with the general population.  Such parents are more likely to be triggered negatively by their foster children and tend to have poor mentalizing skills.  It could be very beneficial for foster parents to improve upon their mentalizing skills, as they would be less likely to jump to conclusions about their foster children’s negative behaviors and intentions, and as a result will be more likely to interact with them in a therapeutic manner.  Mentalization-based clinical interventions have shown promise in improving mental health outcomes for children.  However foster parents often do not have access to such clinical interventions.  Thus, the purpose of this project was to create a practical, low-cost psychoeducational intervention for foster parents in hopes that such a training could improve parents’ ability to mentalize. The main hypothesis for this study was that only participants in the intervention would increase their mentalizing skills by the end of the intervention.  

Methods

This study was conducted from 2011-2014 in Texas and was an quasi-experimental comparison group design.  Fifty-four foster parents in received the intervention over the course of six weeks and 48 foster parents received a typical training as a comparison group.  Participants totaled 102 foster parents with an average age of 44.  The majority were Caucasian (61%), with another 18% African-American and 15% Hispanic.  Pre/post data were collected measuring reflective functioning (Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire and the Five-Minute Speech Sample coded for RF).

Results

Multivariate analyses revealed significant differences between the groups post training, with the intervention parents’ significantly increasing their reflective capacities (t(42) = 2.98, p = .005), while the comparison group did not show any improvements.  Foster parents in both the intervention and comparison groups began the study with the same level of relatively low reflective abilities.  However, by the end of the study, it was only the parents who went through the intervention who significantly increased their mentalizing abilities.

Conclusions and Implications

This research is breaking new ground, as this is the first known study to demonstrate that a short-term and cost effective intervention can increase foster parents mentalization skills and reflective capacities.  The intervention parents significantly increased their reflective abilities and it is this more developed parental mentalizing that is thought to be key for helping children develop a sense of agency and self-regulation.  Increasing foster parents’ mentalizing abilities can not only help the parents themselves cope with the stress of fostering, but it can increase secure attachments with their foster children, reduce placement breakdowns and positively impact children’s behavior and mental health.