Resetting the Course: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Responding to (Mis)Attunement within the Child Welfare System

Background/Purpose: Youth living in foster care require supportive relationships with attuned caregivers and professionals to meet goals for well-being and permanency. However, high levels of stress, and compliance-focused system requirements, often reroute the course, impeding the efforts of adults to provide this level of care. Limited research has examined the processes by which high quality relationships develop within the child welfare system. The featured research advances the understanding of one key relational process— attunement—by exploring how it is understood, defined, and experienced by multiple stakeholders in the child welfare system.

Methods: In the first stage, four sets of focus groups were conducted with 21 non-kinship foster parents with diverse identities and fostering experience. The four groups of foster parents met twice each, for a total of eight sessions. In the sequence of each 2-session focus group, the first explored foster parents’ experiences of attunement and mis-attunement in their role within the child welfare system. The second meeting introduced the Facilitating Attuned Interactions (FAN) model of attunement, solicited foster parent feedback on an adapted FAN for foster parents, and explored understandings of the applications of the Foster FAN to support foster parents, their foster children, biological families, and child welfare professionals. In the second stage, sets of focus groups were conducted in a similar way with 20 child welfare professionals to broaden understanding of attunement and further adapt the Foster FAN. All groups were held online, transcribed using Otter.ai, and analyzed by the research team using Rapid Qualitative Analysis.

Results: Findings suggest that mis-attunement (as characterized by feeling undervalued, misled, and isolated) is the normative relational experience of foster parents. This impedes access to needed support and services for youth and the families that care for them and contributes to foster parent burnout and turnover. Foster care professionals complement this understanding by highlighting the nature of the child welfare system as “reactionary” and “built on compliance”; this structure inhibits the conditions necessary to develop authentic, attuned relationships. Findings suggest that in the context of these systemic limitations, child welfare work requires stakeholders to develop a strong sense of purpose to inform and sustain their commitment to resetting the course within their sphere of influence.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest a need for increased attunement in building collaborative relationships throughout the child welfare system to reset the course in providing quality care. The potential of attunement skills as adapted to foster parents and child welfare professionals is critical to promoting strong relationships and well-being. As we center relationships, rather than compliance, we can heal the child welfare system from the bottom up, leading to greater change and wellness for those in care.