From the School of Education Annual Report
Supporting Families After Adoption
Professor Tom Baskin talks with a team of graduate students in educational psychology who will work together at local schools on an intervention project for angry students. From left: Nick Rode, Sara Opsteen, Margaret Boero, Shannon Geiger, Tom Baskin, Laura Spiegelberg and Adriana Plach.
Adopting a foster child is a wonderful experience for many families. But once the adoption is finalized, families often don’t receive the support they need to deal with issues the children may have or stresses the new family may face.
Thomas Baskin, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, says children who have been in foster care often have many special needs that must be addressed by the adopting family. These may include medical conditions or limited developmental or cognitive abilities, but can also include feelings of anger, anxiety and depression. Baskin is working with Adoption Resources of Wisconsin to evaluate if a new intervention program can help families better deal with these post-adoption issues.
The intervention program at Adoption Resources of Wisconsin is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The program has two components: forgiveness intervention for the whole family, led by Robert Enright, a founding member of the International Forgiveness Institute and professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at UW-Madison, and intervention, led by Julie Helmrich, a psychologist at the Interpersonal Institute in Milwaukee, based on a model that is used to build emotional communication between married partners.
Baskin’s role involves measuring the participants’ levels of anxiety, anger, depression, relationship satisfaction, self-esteem and forgiveness both before the intervention and once it is complete. In addition, he’ll look at what parents learned and evaluate whether the intervention changed the anxiety and depression family members were feeling. “In the mental health area, those areas are very critical,” he says.
Baskin administered pretests to the families involved in the study and will be testing them again now that they have finished the six workshops to see if they are benefiting from this intervention. For comparison purposes, he is also testing families who are on a waiting list to receive the intervention at a later time. Although the workshops are for parents, Baskin says the theory of the project is that if they can help the parents, this will in turn help the newly-adopted children as well as other siblings.
Baskin says they realize that things may not get better right away for the families. “In the workshops, we bring up a lot of issues and a lot of stress so it is possible that things aren’t better in the short term. But as those problems get resolved, we hope things get better for the family in the long term.” Baskin says they also hope that through the six-week intervention, families will bond and become an ongoing support group for each other, causing their anxiety and depression scores to further improve. If results of the study are positive, a long-term goal is to train individuals at churches and other community organizations to provide this program in the future, and to offer ongoing support for adoptive families.
Sara Opsteen, a master’s degree student in educational psychology with a concentration in school counseling, worked with Baskin on this project. She observed some of the parent workshops and helped administer the pre- and post-tests to the children.
From her observations, Opsteen says it seems that many of the parents gained openness and communication that helped strengthen the relationships with their adopted or foster children. “They also seemed to learn a lot about what the process of forgiveness can do for them in aiding them to become better parents.”
“I learned how challenging parenting children with different problems and backgrounds can be,” Opsteen said. “And I learned how much love, patience and understanding the parents of these children need to have. I also discovered how forgiveness can be a gateway to easing some hardships and issues along the way when working with these children.”
Baskin says that his involvement with this research and intervention has also carried over to another project he is working on with local charter schools. During the fall of 2005, Baskin worked with the International Forgiveness Institute on a project that provided curriculum and training for fifth grade teachers to lead classes on forgiveness, respect and dealing with anger. In the spring of 2006, Baskin and School of Education school counseling students will begin one-on-two interventions with students identified by their teachers as needing extra help and attention in dealing with anger and forgiveness issues.
###
