Adoption & Fostering
Abstracts
Winter 2004 - Vol 28 (4)
Stability, permanence, outcomes and support: foster care and adoption compared
Julie Selwyn and David Quinton
Key words: adoption, long-term fostering, planning for permanence
There are large numbers of children in the care system who are unable to return home and who need a stable permanent placement. This article reports some of the findings of a Department of Health-funded study, which followed a complete sample of 130 older children, all of whom had had a best interest decision in favour of adoption as the chosen placement. In the event, not all the children were adopted, making it possible to compare the outcomes of children who were adopted with those who went into long-term foster placements. There were many similarities in the experience of offering an adoptive or foster home to the young people but some key differences were in the stability of placements, the amount of autonomy the adoptive parents/carers had and their views of how close they were to the child and their assessment of the child's closeness to them.
Julie Selwyn is the Director of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies, University of Bristol
David Quinton is Emeritus Professor of Psycho-social Development, University of Bristol
Achieving permanence for looked after children through special guardianship: a study of the experience of New Zealand guardians with implications for special guardianship in England
Peter Ward
Key words: special guardianship, permanence, looked after children, adoption, foster care, kinship care
Special guardianship orders will be introduced in England in 2005 as an integral part of the Government's policy to create more opportunities for permanent family placement, thereby reducing the numbers of looked after children. Special guardianship is designed to fill a niche in permanence provision by persuading both foster carers and kinship carers to offer a home, free of regular social services involvement, to children who would otherwise remain looked after. Particular targets are older children for whom adoption is inappropriate or unachievable for those wishing to maintain a positive relationship with a birth parent. However, similar predecessors, such as custodianship and residence orders, have foundered due to lack of interest from such carers. What is likely to make a difference this time around? What will tempt carers to make a move away from their dependence on local authorities and take that final step towards legal permanence? Peter Ward's study describes New Zealand's experience of guardianship which has been available there since 1968. Discussions with 20 NZ guardians and their former foster children indicate what special guardians in England will require to make such an option attractive to them and effective for young people.
Peter Ward is County Manager for Adoption & Family Placement services, Norfolk County Council
Parent mentoring: an innovative approach to adoption support
Caroline Archer and Christine Gordon
Key words: adoption support, attachment disorganisation, developmental neurobiology, family narrative, language of trauma, parent mentoring, therapeutic re-parenting
Adopters are taking increasingly traumatised children into their families. These children bring with them disorganised attachment patterns that helped them survive early familial maltreatment. Since they were highly adaptive in their formative family environment, children cling to these relational patterns 'as if their lives depended on it'. As part of the Family Futures therapeutic team, the authors have established effective frameworks for collaborative working, based on trauma and developmental-attachment theories, and developed the practitioner role of parent mentor. Taking behaviour as the child's 'first language', mentors help adopters understand and translate youngsters' behavioural and thinking patterns in terms of their traumatic histories. Parents are then encouraged to increase their children's physical, psychological and social sensitivity by using developmentally-appropriate reparenting strategies, acknowledging the psychosocial 'gaps' in children's attachment histories that inhibit healthy neuro-developmental organisation. Gradually the neurobiology and language of trauma can be overwritten by the neurobiology and language of love.
Caroline Archer is an adoptive parent and member the Family Futures team, and maintains an independent mentoring service for families in South Wales
Christine Gordon is an adoptive parent with many years' experience, and co-founder and Co-director of Family Futures Consortium, London
Living a provisional existence: thinking about foster carers and the emotional containment of children placed in their care
Leslie Ironside
Key words: original fathers, grief, loss and impotency, searching, contact and reunion
Foster carers can find themselves placed in a situation of extreme difficulty and trauma when looking after abused, deprived and neglected children and their ability to manage can be tested to an intolerable degree. Leslie Ironside examines the sometimes extraordinary states he calls 'living a provisional existence', in which foster carers feel 'locked in' and forced to parent in a way that feels very contrary to their hopes and ideals. It is a state filled with contradiction and confusion and the foster child is experienced as having 'got under the skin' of the foster carer in a very destructive way. This article explores how this state of being can be understood and usefully conceptualised in terms of emotions evoked in the foster carers through the child's projection of intolerable feelings. The foster carer may then become filled with the very feelings that the child cannot deal with and the foster carer's emotional reaction can be understood in terms of the child successfully imparting his or her feelings to those who are charged with their care.
Leslie Ironside is a child and adolescent psychotherapist in private practice in Brighton, East Sussex
Searching for siblings: the motivations and experiences of adults seeking contact with adopted siblings
Anna Ludvigsen and Jo Parnham
Key words: adoption, intermediary service, birth siblings, searching
In recent years the nature of birth sibling relationships has become a subject of considerable attention within the care system and in relation to adoption. It is now generally recognised that knowledge of and, if possible, contact between adopted children and their birth siblings is of major importance for the identity formation of individual children. However, the significance of this for later life has been little explored. What is the importance of introducing or sustaining contact between siblings who may never have lived together, who only know each other superficially or who are not even aware of each other's existence? One way of shedding more light on such sibling relations is to look at sibling separations and, in particular, at birth siblings who in adult life search for an adopted brother or sister. A significant proportion of birth relatives who approach Barnardo's for information about an adopted adult are birth siblings. They seek information and help to trace their adopted sibling in order to gain contact and reunion. The research reported here focuses on birth siblings' motivations for searching, their feelings in relation to the search and their experiences of contact and reunion with their 'lost' sibling.
Anna Ludvigsen is a research assistant with Barnardo's Policy and Research Unit
Jo Parnham is a senior practitioner at Barnardo's Family Connection service
The early developmental histories of children who go on to experience multiple placement moves in the care system
Gerard McCarthy
Key words: looked after children, developmental histories, multiple placements
This article reports on a study that investigated the early developmental histories of children who go on to experience multiple placement moves in the care system. A social services information system was used to identify a group of children (n = 11) who had experienced over ten placement moves in a three-year period, excluding short-term respite moves. A comparison group of children (n = 10) was also identified who had experienced low levels of placement moves in the care system. The social services and community child health records of the children were assessed using a checklist for a range of problematic behaviours. Results indicated that children who experienced many moves in the care system were much more likely to have experienced multiple problem behaviours prior to entering care than children in the comparison group. Whereas the mean number of problem behaviours prior to being placed in care for the control group was approximately one, the mean number of problem behaviours for the group who experienced many placement moves was nearly five. The service and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
Gerard McCarthy is Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Gloucestershire Partnership NHS Trust, Gloucester
Legal notes: England and Wales
Deborah Cullen
Legal notes: Scotland
Alexandra Plumtree
Legal notes: Northern Ireland
Kerry O'Halloran
Health notes: Fact or fiction? A review of self-declared health issues compared to information from formal medical examination
Ann Green and Sarah Smith
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