“Caring is sharing”: Creating a holding environment of quality relationships between the home and the facilitated group-home for children with extensive support needs.

The proposed PDM project handles the issue of sharing the care for children or adolescents with severe or profound intellectual disabilities (SPID), in which care is shared between the home environment and the facilitated group-home as care contexts. Though a number of valid reasons could be given to choose for a (part-time) transition to a facilitated group-home, this transition is still major for both the parents and their children with SPID. In this project, we will adopt an attachment perspective to examine the decision process and the transition to facilitated group-homes for children with SPID. This will grant us scientific, empirical knowledge on the ways in which both care contexts can be a 'holding environment' for these children, in which the latter retrieve a sense of trust and emotional security. The three-year research plan involves three studies, each focusing on a different aspect of this transition and each adopting different (quantitative and/or qualitative) research methods. The project will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Bea Maes and Prof. Dr. Guy Bosmans.

Keywords:Attachment, Children, Intellectual disability, Transition, Facilitated group-homes

Disciplines:Social and emotional development, Behavioural and emotional problems, Disabilities and developmental disorders, Orthopedagogical interventions