ABSTRACT
The lack of prepared and available foster parents for children with prenatal substance effects is of increasing concern to the child welfare field. Effective foster parent training is needed to assure infants are fostered by knowledgeable, skilled foster parents and that the foster parents feel supported and effective in taking on their responsibilities. The training was designed so that the foster parents would have opportunities to achieve highly specific learning objectives. True random assignment of subjects was impossible because of the voluntary nature of foster parent training; the samples of foster parents for both the treatment group and the comparison groups were therefore self-selected. The possibility exists that some foster parents who attended the training decided as a result of the training not to foster infants with prenatal substance effects. Infants with prenatal substance effects may require specialized care and foster parents need to be prepared to provide it.
