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Exploring Trauma: Lived Experiences Of Foster Parents In The Foster Care System, Audrey Michelle Butler

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative transcendental phenomenology study explored the lived experiences of foster parents who care for traumatized children. Children in the foster care system are often exposed to trauma before and after entering the foster care system. Therefore, the trauma that foster children experience can impact them emotionally, psychologically, and cognitively. Unfortunately, foster parents are often unequipped to deal with these issues when these children enter their homes. The gap this study aimed to address was that foster parents did not have opportunities to share their experiences on what it was like to provide care for traumatized foster children. Husserl’s phenomenology …