Managing Loss and a Threatened Identity: Experiences of Parents of Children Growing Up in Foster Care, the Perspectives of their Social Workers and Implications for Practice

Abstract

Anglia. She has a special research interest in family placement and has published widely on foster-care, attachment and permanence. Bente Moldestad is a clinical social worker and a researcher in 'The Norwegian Longitudinal Study on Out-of-Home Care' in the Child Protection Unit, Uni Research, University of Bergen. She has published a range of articles on parents of children in foster care and kinship care. Dr Ingrid Höjer is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg. Her main research interest is child welfare, with a focus on foster care, including foster families, sons and daughters of foster carers and parents of children in foster care. She has published widely in these areas. Her recent research is on young people leaving care. Dr Emma Ward is a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Research on the Child and Family, University of East Anglia. She has worked on a range of projects including studies of prospective adoptive parents, permanence in foster care and parents of children in foster-care. Her current research is on looked after children and offending. Dag Skilbred is a child welfare worker with main interests in interactive competence, parent counselling and inter-agency work, and has published in these areas. He is now working in the project 'Screening of Children within Child Welfare Service-Inter-Agency Work on Assessments and Services' at the Child Protection Unit, Uni Research, University of Bergen. Julie Young is a Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Research on the Child and Family, University of East Anglia. She has been involved in studies of adoption, the influence of post-adoption contact on all parties, the adjustment of birth relatives to the adoption of their children, fostering and child protection. Dr Toril Havik is a specialist in clinical child psychology and Head of Research at the Child Protection Unit, Uni Research, University of Bergen. She leads the research programme 'The Norwegian Longitudinal Study of Out-of-Home Care' and has published widely on varied aspects of foster care.

Hope and Siege: The Experiences of Parents Whose Children Were Placed in Residential Care

“…The study findings indicate several key experiences that consolidate into a general narrative, which includes different poles of intense feelings of helplessness and control, loss and meaning, acceptance and guilt. The findings of this study reinforce those of other studies (e.g., Haagenstad, 1992;Schofield, et al, 2010), creating a solid basis for understanding how the parents perceive the effect of the children's removal from home.…”

“…In a study in Israel, Jaffe (1976) reported that most of the parents perceived the arrangement as necessary, in light of their health, economic, and personal problems, as well as their inability to cope with the children, which prevented them from caring for their children at home. Qualitative interviews in a focus group with parents whose children were placed in foster care in England, Norway, and Sweden (Schofield et al, 2010) found a common similarity, including the need to manage feelings of loss, grief and anger and the need to handle the threat of losing their parental identity and status when their children placed in foster care.…”

Continuity, Engagement and Integration: Early Intervention in Remote Australian Aboriginal Communities

“…Reunification may require parents to revisit powerful emotions associated with loss of the child and their sense of responsibility for the original removal, with deep uncertainty about their capacity to adequately resume their parenting role (Schofield et al, 2011). This family confronted many challenges with the return of a child who had been raised outside of the community.…”

The Experience of Parents of Children in Care: The Human Rights Issue

“…In fact parents are likely to feel that there is an imbalance of rights and this imbalance is against their child's interests as well as their own. Indeed, when a child is removed by the child protection services from parental care, the loss and grief experienced by the parent whose identity as a parent is threatened is acute, as is the child's own experience of trauma (Burgheim, 2005;Schofield et al, 2010). Again any notion of unfair proceedings and imbalance of rights only compounds these feelings.…”