Translating Discovery Science. Improving self‐efficacy in grandparents raising grandchildren: Results from a strengths‐based education intervention

Abstract

Background: Custodial grandparents often protect against childhood trauma and promote resilience in their grandchildren. In this role, grandparents face many challenges and may lack confidence in their parenting abilities. Increasing grandparent self-efficacy may help promote grandfamily resilience. Yet few interventions exist to help grandparents adapt to challenges faced as primary parenting figures for grandchildren. Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the preliminary efficacy of a strengths-based intervention for grandparents raising grandchildren and explore whether it would improve grandparent self-efficacy. Method: Grandparents providing primary care to grandchildren participated in a 6-week intervention, single-group, pretest-posttest design. Self-efficacy was assessed at baseline (N = 149), post-intervention (n = 104), and 6 months (n = 55). A linear mixed effects analysis was conducted to test the effect of the intervention on grandparent self-efficacy. Results: The intervention was associated with small improvements in grandparents' self-efficacy, after controlling for demographic variables and perceived social support. These improvements were sustained over time. All human subject procedures complied with the approved Colorado State University Institutional Review Board protocol #19-8657H and University of Hawaii at Manoa Human Studies Program protocol CHS #23779.

Strength and Resilience for Kinship Caregivers Raising Children: A Scoping Review

“…Of the 25 studies, 13 employed quantitative methods, nine were qualitative studies, and three used mixed methods. Among the quantitative studies (see Table 1), seven employed a cross-sectional design [40][41][42][43][44][45][46], while six utilized a longitudinal design [47][48][49][50][51][52]. Four articles [47,49,50,52] were intervention studies, which employed pre-test and post-test assessments to examine the impact of interventions provided to kinship caregivers on caregiver and child outcomes.…”

“…Among the quantitative studies (see Table 1), seven employed a cross-sectional design [40][41][42][43][44][45][46], while six utilized a longitudinal design [47][48][49][50][51][52]. Four articles [47,49,50,52] were intervention studies, which employed pre-test and post-test assessments to examine the impact of interventions provided to kinship caregivers on caregiver and child outcomes. Musil et al's study (2013) collected data at three time points to address their research question [51].…”

“…Regarding quantitative studies, most of the outcomes were related to caregivers' health [41], mental health [42,45,49,51], self-esteem [44], self-efficacy [47], overall well-being [48], family function [50], resilience [40], parenting or relationship with children [42,45,46,52], and life satisfaction [43] (Mendoza et al, 2020). Three studies also included child outcomes in their research, such as child health [42] (Gomez, 2021) and well-being [41,50].…”

“…Stress can arise from parenting stress, economic stress, family stress, and more. Five of the identified studies found that how kinship caregivers coping with stress is related to their resilience in terms of raising relative's children [40,43,[45][46][47]52,54,60]. A more common coping strategy used by kinship caregivers was faith and spirituality.…”

“…Additionally, kinship caregivers used other methods such as having shared festive leisure with the children to manage their stress, which further brought benefits for them, including increased creativity, improved physical condition, happiness, better relationship with children, and new manual and technical skills [46,58]. Fox et al (2022) developed an intervention aimed at improving kinship caregivers' self-care skills [47]. Fox et al (2022) and Fruhauf et al (2022) found that when using self-care to cope with stress, caregiver's self-efficacy improved [47,58].…”