Foster parents support the child welfare system by looking after children who need to be cared for away from home. They serve as surrogate or substitute parents until the child is reunited with his or her birth parents or an alternate permanent home is found. The experience of foster parents when a child they have cared for leaves their home is rarely recognised or discussed. This study seeks to learn more about the feelings that foster parents experience in such situations. Evaluation instruments include a quantitative scale and an open-ended question. Results from both these analyses suggest that foster parents do experience significant grief upon the loss of their children, and that this emotion takes several forms and affects the recruitment and retention of carers.

The training foster parents receive in America, pass the initial training required to certify them to take children into their homes, is not standardized. The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 (H.R. 3443) requires prospective foster parents to be trained, but it provides only general guidelines for the training content. The training offered differs by state. This research examines what a group of foster parents attending a state foster parent association conference felt they needed in the area of training, to help them fulfil their role. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Foster parents were surveyed and ranked their training needs based on 10 pre‐identified needs. They also responded to an open‐ended question about their training needs. Foster parents ranked training to enhance their ability to help the child adjust in their homes and manage challenging behaviours as most needed. The qualitative data suggested that foster parents have additional needs and some are not related to training, such as the need for respite services.

Foster parents often feel irresolvable grief when a child they have loved and nurtured is removed from their home. Their grief response is frequently unrecognised and misunderstood, and can lead to problems regarding the retention of the carers on which the system relies. This article examines the challenge of retaining foster parents and describes the development of a grief awareness training programme for foster care and adoption workers as an effort to improve recruitment and retention. A one-group pre-test/post-test design was used to examine the difference in knowledge enhancement and understanding about foster parent grief after the training was administered to a sample of foster care and adoption workers.

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