Mary Dozier has spent the last decade, in collaboration with the Delaware Division of Family Services, researching the special needs of young children in foster care.

Now, with the support of a $3.7 million federal grant, the professor of psychology is examining how foster parents can best learn to meet those needs.

Dozier's grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) will enable her to continue her work with Delaware's family services agency. Over the past 10 years, the collaboration has developed model training programs for foster parents. All foster parents in northern Delaware who take in a child 20 months old or younger receive the training, which is provided one-on-one in their homes by a member of Dozier's professional staff. The training is continued, with the birth or adoptive parents, after the children leave foster care.

With the NIMH grant, Dozier says, she will evaluate how effective these training programs are. The grant calls for her to study the foster children for about five years, but she says she intends to follow their development until they reach adulthood and become parents themselves.

The research will have national and international applications, Dozier says, because little science-based data currently is available on the effectiveness of prevention programs for foster children and their relationships with care providers.

Cari DeSantis, secretary of the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, says the research will help the agency support foster parents in improving the lives of the children in their care.

"Children in foster care have experienced trauma, which led to removal from their homes. That removal is a second trauma," DeSantis says. "Foster parents are critical to providing safety, stability, self-esteem and a sense of hope in children at a very vulnerable time in their lives."

Dozier's research will be centered in the University's new Early Learning Center, where she is research director. The studies are representative of the kind of translational research, or research that can be translated from basic science to interventions and preventions, that will take place there, she says.

The center, which is expected to begin providing child care next year, already has sponsored its inaugural research symposium on the topic "Brain, Behavior and Prevention: The Development of Self-Regulatory Capabilities."

Dozier says her collaboration with the Division of Family Services over the last decade has identified three key issues for children who experience disruptions in care at an early age. The 10-session training program she's developed teaches foster parents interventions that target these needs. Dozier describes the targeted areas:

• Children in such circumstances often push care providers away emotionally when they suffer setbacks or difficulties, acting as if they can handle things on their own. The training helps the foster parents learn to be nurturing, even when the child might suggest he or she does not need their care.
  
  
• These children often develop what Dozier calls "disorganized attachments" to a parent figure, as a result of the fear of threatening behaviors or abandonment by caregivers. It is particularly important that foster caregivers provide nurturing care when such children are distressed, she says. The training is designed to help provide people with the means to be nurturing to a child in distress, even if they might not otherwise behave in a nurturing way.
  
  
• Finally, children who have experienced such disruptions in care are often dysregulated in their production of stress hormones, Dozier says. The training gives the foster parents strategies for helping the children regulate their behaviors and emotions.

Through the NIMH grant, Dozier will assess the functioning of infants and toddlers who enter the foster care system before caregivers receive training and for five years after the training. About 40 Delaware foster families--almost the entire group receiving the training--have volunteered to be part of the clinical study to date. Eventually, Dozier says, she plans to study 250 families.

"Children's ability to form new trusting relationships, their ability to form relationships with peers and their sense of themselves as valued individuals are some of the interpersonal outcomes we are examining," she says. "Their ability to control their frustration and anger when aroused and to behave in socially appropriate ways are some of the behavioral outcomes we are examining. Finally, their ability to control their physiology is examined, as well."

She says it is expected that the training programs for the foster parents will have positive effects in enabling the children to trust, to control their anger and to control their physiology.

"It's very exciting work," she says. "We'd also like to do this with high-risk birth parents someday."

--Neil Thomas, AS '76