The placement of siblings is one of the biggest challenges confronting family placement workers today. Almost all children in public care have at least one brother or sister, although they may not always have lived with them. The Children Act 1989 stresses the desirability of placing related children together but the success or not of joint placements compared with single ones has been little studied.
This book puts the issues surrounding permanent placement of children who have siblings firmly on the agenda. The first major interview-based study of sibling relationships in permanent placement follows a sample of 133 children in middle childhood placed with 72 new families. It explores patterns of separation and reunion, and the outcomes for jointly and singly placed children. The quality of relationships, both between adults and children and between children themselves, is seen as critical to perceived success of the placement, and factors associated with difficult relationships are discussed in the context of providing support for children and families facing problems.
The family placement field has waited a long time for a new and systematic study focusing on the complexity of placing children who have siblings. Practitioners and researchers in the fields of both social work and children's mental health care will be interested to see how key questions have been addressed and will learn from the findings that have emerged.
Contents include:
Sibling research and sibling placements
Sibling networks, contact and placement decisions
Children's earlier experiences
Outcomes after a year in placement
The children's behaviour and relationships
The character of sibling relationships
The impact on the birth children
Social work intervention with siblings placed together
Social work practitioners including family placement workers and managers will find the overview and summary of key points at the end of each chapter particularly helpful in accessing the findings of this ground-breaking study.
The study was carried out by the Maudsley Family Research Studies team at the Institute of Psychiatry, London where Alan Rushton is Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Cherilyn Dance is Research Co-ordinator and Deborah Mayes is a Research Worker. David Quinton is now Professor of Psychosocial Development in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol and Director of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies at Bristol.
