Support for adoptive parents

Qualitative findings

Facilitating engagement in support:

• Practitioner warmth and genuine passion are vital to building trusting relationships, fostering engagement, and making participants feel valued
• Providing a space to focus on parents’ needs was welcomed and seen as useful
• Parents have limited time and want to use it wisely; interventions need to be perceived as relevant and effective to maintain engagement
• Clear, accessible information helps adoptive parents to engage with support
• The assumption that primary caregivers are female can be a barrier to male parents, single women, and same-sex couples accessing support

Types of support:

• Facilitated peer support provides parents with a much-needed space for emotional support, reciprocal learning, and feeling heard and seen
• Adoptive parents value interventions that are structured but have room for flexibility, enabling facilitators to be responsive to individual needs
• Adoptive parents value learning strategies that integrate theory and practice
• Adoptive parents valued interventions that included multi-agency support and provided a network around the child

Perceived benefits of support:

• Understanding and having a space for self-care
• Perceived improvements in emotional regulation and ability to engage in reflection before responding to children
• Perceived increases in parental confidence and empowerment

Quantitative findings

Effective interventions had the following common elements:

• Psychoeducation, which provides information related to mental health, emotional wellbeing, and psychological processes to support understanding. This may include child development, parent-child interactions, parenting styles, the effects of abuse and trauma, and how parental well-being influences their children
• Relationship enhancement/promoting parental sensitivity, for example, practice focused on parent-child play and communication, observation, and child-led interactions.