9th International Congress of Clinical and Health Psychology in Children and Adolescents
acerca de la utilidad de ACT en el tratamiento de la
problemática infanto-juvenil.
S9 "AND AFTER THE ADOPTION?": NEEDS
AND INTERVENTIONS AS SEEN BY FAMILIES
AND PROFESSIONALS
Chair/Coordinador: Rangel Henriques, M.
Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal
This Symposium focuses on post-adoption and
aims to accrue knowledge in the field, bridging
the domains of clinical psychology and the child
protection. The challenges to being an adoptive
family are multiple, and everyone involved in the
process knows the risk of the family' rupture after
the child goes to live with the new family. The work
of the professionals during the pos-adoption is
very complex once it acts on different levels, giving
support to the family and simultaneously assessing
the well-being of the child, the adequacy of parents'
practices, and the quality of ties. The Symposium
will include two empirical studies centered in the
needs of the post-adoption life. The first study
lays out the professionals’ perspective about the
families’ needs and their experiences with the
intervention during this period. The second one
describes the adoption parent’s perspective about
the post-adoption, to identify parenting strengths,
weaknesses, and needs. These studies will provide
important clues to improve post-adoption services,
which in Portugal, despite being previewed in the
law, the practices lack systematized and well-de-
veloped programs. The third communication intro-
duces a new intervention approach, consisting in
a Mindful Parenting Model for Portuguese adoptive
parents. The symposium closes by putting forward
some practices usually implemented within the first
months of the child arriving at the new family and
illustrating specific intervention strategies in this
period, namely with a LGBT+ adoption families. A
collaborative approach between professionals and
families will also contribute to the openness of
communication in the system and the coherence
of the adoptee's narrative identity, related to the
child's well-being.
CS34 EMERGING THEORY ON THE RELEVANCE
OF POST-ADOPTION SERVICES – A
QUALITATIVE STUDY WITH PROFESSIONALS OF
A PORTUGUESE ADOPTION SERVICE
Narciso, I. (1); Venâncio, C. (1); San Payo, E. (1); Rangel-
Henriques, M. (2)
(1) Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, (2) Universida-
de do Porto, Porto, Portugal
The development of adoptive families includes
a wide range of tasks and challenges, expected or
unexpected, both for the parents and the adopted
children, throughout two phases: pre-adoption and
post-adoption. Adoption services tend to consider that
their intervention with adoptive families is complete
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after full adoption, i. e., after the court decision and
deliberation, despite the growing scientific and clinical
recognition of the strong family need of specialized
support at this stage. As far as we know, the scientific
literature on intervention in the post-adoption phase is
still very insuffcient. Thus, the present study, based on
a qualitative methodological approach with semi-struc-
tured interviews with 21 professionals working in one
of the main adoption services in Portugal, aimed to
analyze the view of those adoption professionals on
the need to maintain the intervention with families
after full adoption, as well as its conceptualization
regarding the nature, functioning and intervention of
post-adoption services. The results highlighted the
maintenance of parental and child diffculties, the
construction of adoptive identity and the impact on
family reorganization as the main reasons for con-
tinuing the intervention. The following characteristics
regarding post-adoption services emerged with par-
ticularly relevance: open follow-up service, systemic
clinical nature, specialized in adoption, networking,
multi and inter-disciplinary; intervention focused on
identification of diffculties and support for overcoming
them; identity issues; adoption communication. The
emerging theories of professionals about intervention
in the post-adoption phase, constitute, therefore, a
contribution to the deepening of scientific knowledge
on the subject, as well as to the development of inter-
vention with adoptive families in post-adoption phase,
framed in post-adoption services.
CS35 ADOPTIVE PARENTS’ VOICES ON
PARENTING STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES AND
NEEDS – WHAT CLUES FOR A POST-ADOPTION
SERVICE?
San Payo, E. (1); Narciso, I. (1); Venâncio, C. (1); Rangel-
Henriques, M. (2)
(1) Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, (2) Universida-
de do Porto, Porto, Portugal
Many studies reveal that the majority of adoptive
families and, more specifically, children, develop within
normative standards. Such adaptive results draw atten-
tion to the imperative of directing the scientific gaze to
the post-adoption phase and, thus, understanding the
subjective experience of the adopted child in a contex-
tualized way in the family dynamics, investigating fac-
tors and processes of the new family reality that lead to
restorative adoptions from an adverse past or, on the
contrary, more fragile and, therefore, less capable of
promoting resilience trajectories. Recently, it has been
demonstrated that the way in which the relationships
and challenges related to adoption are experienced
in the post-adoption period is extremely relevant for
adjustment, and may even be a better predictor than
the relational and biological inheritance of the child or
its condition of adoptability per se. Thus, the present
study, based on a qualitative methodological approach
with semi-structured interviews with 24 adoptive par-
ents, had as main objectives to analyze the parents'
experience in relation to family functioning, parenting
difficulties and overcoming difficulties, as well as their
beliefs about differences and similarities between