COVID-19 and resource families: an examination of ongoing impact and disparities

ABSTRACT

Resource parents (n = 527) in Los Angeles County were surveyed about their experiences with COVID-19, comparing the beginning of “Safer-at-Home” to over a year later. The findings reveal increased infection rates, maintained or increased reports of adverse impact and coping challenges, decreased reports of positive impact, and increased access to resources across time points. Compared to White resource parents, Black and Latinx resource parents reported both more adverse and more positive impact and less access to resources. Further, single caregiver households reported more financial worries, and foster parents and kinship caregivers reported more coping challenges than foster-adoptive parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Adoption
• child welfare
• COVID-19
• resource parents
• health disparities

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Foster Together Network, a group of public and private partners committed to helping recruit and retain resource families in Los Angeles County, and the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services for their support and assistance in distributing the surveys to resource families.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Pritzker Foster Care Initiative supported this research through a generous donation to the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families. Funding sources were not involved in any part of the study design, data analysis, or writing of the manuscript.

Notes on contributors

Matthew A. Ruderman

Matthew A. Ruderman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who specializes in early childhood mental health, research and evaluation, bullying and victimization, preschool mental health consultation, and trauma-informed care. He received his doctorate in Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Ruderman completed his doctoral internship at St. John’s Child and Family Development Center and his postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA TIES for Families. Before rejoining the TIES staff, he served as staff psychologist, supervisor, and trainer at a community mental health clinic. Dr. Ruderman is the recipient of Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship focusing on addressing health disparities, health inequities, and building a culture of health.

Kenyon Lee Whitman

Kenyon Lee Whitman, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has over 10 years of experience working in higher education, much of that time supporting foster youth. Most recently he was a UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, and previously he directed the Office of Foster Youth Support Services at UC Riverside for six years. He received his PhD in Higher Education Administration and Policy at UC Riverside. Kenyon’s research is interdisciplinary, he focuses on underrepresented students in higher education, specifically, the racialized college-going experiences of foster youth. As a former foster youth, he understands first-hand the challenges foster youth face as they work toward earning a college degree. Kenyon also holds a B.S. and M.A. from Fresno State.

Vanessa Perez

Vanessa Perez graduated from UCLA in 2020 with a major in Psychology and a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. While at UCLA, she worked as a research assistant in the CHILD FIRST lab, headed by Dr. Bruce Chorpita. As a research assistant, she examined different interventions aimed at increasing client engagement in mental health services and aided in exploring service equity in the Latinx community. Vanessa also conducted an independent research project examining whether the addressability of life stressors in therapy sessions differed depending on what type of treatment protocol a client was assigned to and if the addressability of the life stressor predicted the provider’s use of structured activities in the session in which the life stressor was disclosed. Vanessa plans to apply to graduate programs in Clinical Psychology in 2022. She is particularly interested in exploring the effectiveness and accessibility of evidence-based treatments in community-based clinics to help serve culturally and socioeconomically diverse youth affected by trauma.

Jill Waterman

Jill Waterman, Ph.D. was one of the initial developers of TIES for Adoption in 1995 (now UCLA TIES for Families) and currently is the Associate Director of Infant Mental Health, as well as a supervisor of psychology externs and postdoctoral fellows. She is Adjunct Professor Emerita in the UCLA Psychology Department and former Coordinator of the UCLA Psychology Clinic, the training clinic for UCLA’s top-ranked Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program. Dr. Waterman’s research involves long-term follow-up of children adopted from foster care and their families (many now adolescents and young adults), as well as evaluation, treatment and follow-up of prenatally exposed infants placed with foster parents who hope to adopt them, and evaluation of Adoption-specific Therapy. Dr. Waterman is author of 3 books on aspects of child trauma and numerous articles, and is the lead author of Adoption-Specific Therapy: A Guide to Helping Adopted Children and their Families Thrive, published by American Psychological Association Books in 2018. In addition, she is a practicing clinician specializing in treatment with parents and young children.

Todd Franke

Trained in social work and educational psychology, Todd Franke, Ph.D. seeks to achieve a better understanding of, and improve the responsiveness of service systems in the fields of social services, education and health. Dr. Franke’s research has focused in part on the impact of disability and chronic illness on school-age children. He is currently conducting a study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on the use of personal assistance services for children with disabilities. In addition, Dr. Franke studies how adolescents solve social problems; urban mobility and its impact on children’s education and social development; and how to successfully integrate health and social services in school settings. Dr. Franke is active in several local and regional efforts to restructure social services in the schools, helping to conceptualize planning and implementation and the design of evaluation measures in Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest school district. His primary work occurs at the intersection of youth violence (child welfare and gang involved youth) and education. Additionally, he has numerous years of experience in conducting cross-sectional and longitudinal research in the fields of education, child welfare and adolescent violence.

Audra K. Langley

Audra K. Langley, Ph.D. is the Director of UCLA TIES for Families. Dr. Langley is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Health Sciences at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the UCLA DGSOM Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Langley also co-directs the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families and is the Child Welfare lead for the DMH UCLA Prevention Center of Excellence. Dr. Langley is an experienced clinician and researcher who specializes in culturally responsive, trauma and resiliency informed care for children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress and her body of work has sought to increase access to quality mental health interventions for under-resourced populations of children, including those involved in the child welfare system and school based mental health. Dr. Langley is the author of 4 treatment manuals and books, including “ADAPT Adoption-specific Psychotherapy: A Guide to helping Adopted Children and Their Families Thrive” and “Bounce Back: an Elementary School Intervention for Childhood Trauma.” She has presented and published numerous research papers and trainings on her work.