Exploring parenting behaviors, stress, and closeness among foster parents

•Most foster parents revealed authoritative parenting practices.•Authoritative and authoritarian parents reported more parenting stress.•Authoritative parents reported more closeness with foster children. This mixed methods study with a triangulation design aimed to explore the impact of parenting styles and those that most make up parenting care among foster parents today. We assessed how foster parents individually view their management of childcare, perceived levels of support, and education opportunities surrounding foster care parenting practices or level of received preparedness. Furthermore, this study offered insight into if parental styles are associated with parental perceived stress level, and foster parent-foster child closeness. Preexisting secondary data from the Fostering Healthy Relationships study was utilized. This study contained national survey data and focus group transcriptions from licensed foster parents, which were collected during 2018–2019. Our current sample included quantitative data from 457 foster parent participants and qualitative data from 12 participants. Overall, the results indicated most parents who responded to the survey revealed having participated in authoritative parenting practices. Those with authoritative and authoritarian parenting practices had more stress, while authoritative reported more closeness with foster children.