PRIDE Info

Together We Can Make A Difference With PRIDE: Standardized Foster Parent Training

Pride stands for Parent Resources for Information, Development, and Education. PRIDE is Idaho's standardized curriculum of training for foster and adoptive parents and the new model of practice.

The PRIDE curriculum was developed by the Child Welfare League of America. The model is designed to strengthen the quality of family foster-care and adoption services. It provides a standardized, consistent, structured framework for the competency-based development and support for foster and adoptive families.

Prior to obtaining a license to become a foster or adoptive parent, applicants will participate in a pre-service training by a team of co-facilitators that includes experienced foster parents, university faculty, and Idaho Health and Welfare staff. Prospective foster parents will be required to attend 27 hours of pre-service training.

The training includes nine sessions:

1. Session One: Connecting with PRIDE
   This session helps participants learn about the world of foster care and adoption through the stories of children receiving child welfare services. Participants can see how foster and adoptive families work as part of the team that provides for the challenging needs of children in their care.
   
2. Session Two: Teamwork Toward Permanence
   This session lays the foundation for understanding birth-family issues and being able to support family relationships.
   
3. Session Three: Meeting Developmental Needs: Attachment
   This session reviews the basics of a child's growth and development, exploring how abuse, neglect, and trauma impact a child's attachment, development, and behavior.
   
4. Session Four: Meeting Developmental Needs: Loss
   The session covers the types of losses children have before they enter foster care and explores how placement can deepen the child's sense of loss. Loss is presented as something everyone must face, and participants have a chance to consider their own responses to losses in life.
   
5. Session Five: Strengthening Family Relationships
   The focus of this session is on family identity, cultural heritage, and self-esteem in children. Participants have the opportunity to learn ways to help a child develop positive cultural identity and important family and sibling connections.
   
6. Session Six: Meeting Developmental Needs: Discipline
   This session explores the challenge of discipline and the difference between discipline and punishment. The session offers an outline of ways foster and adoptive parents can best meet the goal of providing discipline that works.
   
7. Session Seven: Continuing Family Relationships
   This session promotes understanding of permanency timeframes and the importance of the "child's clock" in making permanency decisions.
   
8. Session Eight: Planning Change
   This session takes a practical view of what to expect during the first hours, days, and weeks of a child's placement with a family. Participants learn what to ask the child's worker and how to talk with the child. Participants also have the opportunity to explore how placement will impact their own family - particularly their children.
   
9. Session Nine: Taking PRIDE: Making an Informed Decision
   In the closing session, the participants hear from a panel of experienced members of the child welfare team that may include foster parents, adoptive parents, workers, family members, and foster care youth/alumni.

Selection of foster and adoptive families will be based on five PRIDE core competencies:

Children needing family foster care or adoption:

1. Will be protected and nurtured;
   
2. Will have their developmental needs met and developmental delays addressed;
   
3. Will be given support for their relationships with their families;
   
4. Will be connected to safe, nurturing relationships intended to last a lifetime;
   
5. Will have these needs met by foster and adoptive parents, social workers, and others, who work together as a professional team.