Promoting Trauma-Informed Parenting of Children in Out-of-Home Care: An Effectiveness Study of the Resource Parent Curriculum

The Resource Parent Curriculum (RPC) is a workshop designed to promote trauma-informed parenting among foster, adoptive, and kinship caregivers (i.e., resource parents). The ultimate goal of RPC is to improve placement stability and promote healing from traumatic stress in children who have been placed in out-of-home care. The current study examined data from multiple RPC implementation sites throughout the United States. This study used a pre-versus postworkshop design to assess resource parents' (n = 314) improvement on trauma-informed parenting, perceived self-efficacy for parenting a child who experienced trauma, tolerance of child misbehavior, and whether parent characteristics moderated the impact of RPC on these outcomes. A repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) demonstrated improvement from pre- to postworkshop on trauma-informed parenting F(1, 259) = 11.96, p = .001, eta(2) = .044; parenting self-efficacy F(1, 259) = 17.41, p = .000, eta(2) = .063; and tolerance of child misbehavior F(1, 259) = 3.94, p = .048, eta(2) = .015, regardless of parent characteristics (e.g., age, gender race/ethnicity, and resource parent type). The results of the current study support prior work showing the effectiveness of RPC in improving resource parents' trauma-informed knowledge and attitudes and further demonstrates the effectiveness of RPC with a diverse range of resource parents.