Quality foster care: who decides?

Abstract

The selection of foster parents with qualities necessary to undertake care of other people's children is a difficult task. Little research has been done in identifying what the associated qualities are. This paper reports the first stage of a research study examining these qualities from the perspective of foster parents themselves and experienced family care workers. From a qualitative exercise involving 10 foster parents and 2 family care workers over 50 nominated qualities were elicited covering motivation; personal attributes; knowledge and skills with children and competencies emanating from experience. Arising from this exercise a model was constructed which identifies stages in foster parenting. This could enable differential educational strategies based on a competency approach to be developed in order to achieve a better level of quality control.

Tag Clouds: Visual Representations of the Experiences and Needs of Children and Young People in Care

“…Similar findings about such critical personal characteristics and ways of caring are found throughout the broader out-of-home care literature (Dahms, 1978;Jackson, 2004;Juratowitch & Smith, 1996;Laursen, 2002;Miskimins, 1990;Shealy, 1996).…”

The knowledge of caring: revisiting the need for knowledge support of carers

“…Although care‐providers must be registered in most State and Territory systems in Australia, the level of knowledge and skills that they possess in caring for abused children is largely uncharted territory. Predominantly research has focused on a number of important elements of the fostering experience, such as the qualities and beliefs of foster parents (Juratowitch & Smith 1996; Fisher et al . 2000); foster family system and characteristics (Barth 2001); foster parents' motivation to foster (Andersson 2001; Brown et al .…”