Helping Foster Families through Disruption

Sandra Butler and Marian Charles discuss findings from a small-scale research project examining the dynamics involved in substitute family placements for young people, and assessing the processes demonstrated in fostering breakdowns in terms of the interactions, negotiations and adjustments between the respective parties over time. While briefly exploring carers' expectations of tangible rewards from these experiences, the authors concentrate on the powerful and pervasive effects of intangible rewards. These relate to carers' beliefs that love and care would be reciprocated, that young people would express gratitude, and that they would change sufficiently to fit into their substitute family. Recognising that tangible rewards alone are insufficient to retain carers' valuable services and resources on any long-term basis, the article concludes with suggestions for attending to intangible rewards as a means of maintaining carers' role satisfaction through a crucial sense of a ‘job well done’.

“…This finding complements Aldgate and Hawley's (1986) and Berridge and Cleaver's (1987) recognition of carers' pain, sadness and isolation several years after placement breakdown.…”

Section: Deterioration In Carers' Role Satisfactionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Effects Of Expectations Of Intangible Rewards On Foster Caresupporting

confidence: 76%

The Tangible and Intangible Rewards of Fostering for Carers

Butler

Charles²

1999

“…Assessment practice must take heed of research findings which highlight the 'complex and cumulative' interplay of factors such as a child's behaviour and foster family dynamics. (Aldgate and Hawley, 1986;Berridge and Cleaver, 1987). A systemic approach gives due attention to the need to achieve a fuller understanding of the foster family relationships and those points of potential strain and tension.…”

Section: Quality Carementioning

confidence: 99%

The Systemic Family Approach to Foster Care Assessment a Review and Update

McCracken¹,

Reilly²

1998

In this article Sylvia McCracken and Isobel Reilly apply systemic theory and practice to the assessment of foster carers. The authors believe that insufficient attention is paid to the foster carers' family context and propose that the systemic approach provides a useful framework with which to address the complexities of fostering. Their systemic position derives from both the research findings on fostering outcomes and the recently articulated voices of the birth children of foster carers. Beginning with an analysis of the concerns currently impacting on fostering services and the aims which assessment is expected to achieve, the authors review and update the application of the systemic approach in foster care. An assessment model is developed, based on the premise that the foster family as a whole serves as the context for any placement.

“…Yet Rowe et al (1984) and Wilkinson (1988) found that many placements in their respective studies were still arranged without adequate preparation and/ or post-placement support. Aldgate and Hawley (1986), too, remarked that 'families had been left to struggle on alone until they reached a point of sheer desperation'. Not surprising, perhaps, that families then asked for the children to be removed.…”

Section: Foster Placement Related Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foster Care Outcomes: A Review of Key Research Findings

Triseliotis

1989

This article presents a brief review of key findings from studies in foster care carried out over the last 30 or so years. The main aim is to identify commonalities in findings between different studies that could offer some guidance to practitioners about what seems to lead to successful or negative outcomes. Since Prosser updated the bibliography on foster care research in 1978, major shifts in policy, planning and practice have taken place in relation to the care and treatment of children admitted to local authority care. As a result, foster care seems to have become the preferred method of substitute care. These shifts appear to have been influenced by four major developments: the general move away from institutions towards community care and normalisation; studies highlighting the negative impact on children of residential care, particularly long-term; the apparently successful fostering of some very troublesome adolescents with specially selected, contracted and fee-paid carers; and finally the adverse financial climate of the mid-1970s and the assumed escalating costs of residential care. Though often favoured as the next best thing to a child's own family or adoption, foster care, as we shall see, is not problem-free. Knapp's (1983) studies also showed that, for comparable groups of children, the cost differential between foster and residential care is much narrower than is usually believed.