Foster Parent College: Interactive Multimedia Training for Foster Parents (Research NOTE‪)‬

Children are entering the child care system with increasingly serious physical, behavioral, and emotional problems (Barth, Freundlich, & Brodzinsky, 2000; Crase et al., 2000; Fees et al., 1998; Zukoski, 1999). Foster parents, with high hopes and little or no specialized training, are unexpectedly confronted by children who explode with anger, set fires, lie, steal, are cruel to animals, mutilate themselves, have severe eating disorders, or act out sexually (Crase et al.; Delaney, 1997; McNamara & McNamara, 1990). Up to 40% of new foster parents drop out of the system during their first year (Rhodes, Orme, Cox, & Buehler, 2003), with some agencies losing between 30% and 50% of their foster parents every year (Christian, 2002; Crase et al.). Stanching the dropout rate, in part, will require changes in foster parent training. Parent training has been an essential feature of the foster care system since the mid-1970s (Zukoski, 1999). Today, most states require 12 to 30 hours of preservice training for licensure and six to 20 hours of in-service training annually (National Foster Parent Association, Inc., 2004). Much of the training, however, does not adequately address individual parenting needs and makes unrealistic demands on parents' time and budgets (Grimm, 2003).