Adoption & Fostering

Cultural confusion is a common experience among children in foster care. But it can be especially severe for Muslims when their faith, traditional values and way of life are disrespected and when this is exacerbated by removal from familiar home environments. This article describes the experiences of young people affected by this and critically examines how their situation matches the definitions of good practice in agencies and professionals seeking to help them. Four issues emerged: the child’s confusion surrounding separation and moving to somewhere strange; identifying the right placement; intervening in a way that offers children future choices; and the ever-present risk of discrimination. In each of these situations, well-meaning and firmly established fostering practices can be insensitive to the needs and wishes of Muslim children. This confounds their understanding of their self, depresses their sense of social belonging and demands they adjust in order to survive. The article makes recommendations to support Muslim adolescents entering care and to improve the practice of the professionals and agencies responsible for them. The dearth of specialist therapeutic services is highlighted, along with suggestions for future research.

Looked after children represent a vulnerable group in society, many of whom are exposed to maltreatment, particularly in the form of relational trauma, prior to placement with a foster family. Challenging behaviours can place foster placements at risk and looked after children often confront the possibility of placement breakdown. A carer’s capacity to retain a robust understanding of the children in their care as autonomous individuals with needs, feelings and thoughts can be important in enabling them to respond more effectively to the worrying or disruptive behaviour they may encounter. The Reflective Fostering Programme (RFP) is a new group-based programme aiming to support foster carers of children aged 4–11. This innovative development follows calls by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and other organisations to help improve outcomes for children in care by improving resources for their carers. The RFP is rooted in evidence drawn from the field of contemporary attachment and mentalizing research, which indicates that children who have a carer high in reflective functioning tend to have more favourable outcomes in terms of social-emotional well-being. It also draws on the evidence that looking after a child who has impaired capacity to mentalize as a result of early relational trauma affects the carer’s capacity to mentalize and respond sensitively to the child (Ensink, et al., 2015). This article sets out the rationale for the RFP, outlines its key elements and concludes by indicating future service implementation and a planned feasibility study examining this approach.

Retaining high quality foster carers and helping them to manage the intense emotional impact of caring for young traumatised children is still a major challenge. While foster carer training helps in the short term, international findings suggest that training and support structures alone may not sustain foster carers when times get tough. This article considers the benefits of embedding reflective practice into the role of foster carers. It draws on a qualitative study of five foster carers and two birth mothers receiving specialist help whose children have experienced severe trauma, early neglect and/or abuse and who attend a residential special school for primary-aged children where staff reflective practice is at the core of its work. The carers of all new pupils during a 12-month period were interviewed at the start of placement and one year later and the emerging themes were identified. All of the foster carers reported that after the first year children were less violent and aggressive and more able to verbalise their feelings. Some also began to change their perception of their child’s difficulties. The birth parents also reported improvements but the focus of their concerns and details of the benefits were different. The article argues that in addition to training, all carers who look after severely traumatised children would benefit from regular opportunities to genuinely reflect on the impact that their caring role has on them and that their children’s development will be enhanced by the reduction in challenging behaviour and the risk of placement disruption. However, within the reflective process, different groups of carers will have their own particular concerns.

This rapid review seeks to harvest and draw out common findings from intervention studies aimed at supporting the educational and socio-emotional attainments of school-age children and adolescents in foster care. Using carefully executed inclusion and exclusion criteria, data were collected systematically from six electronic databases. The 19 articles included were appraised critically for quality and analysed using qualitative content analysis. The survey of studies revealed an initial need to improve the quality and quantity of research designed to evaluate interventions of this kind. Nevertheless, an analysis of the findings produced sufficient robust evidence to inform policy and practice with regard to 10 aspects of children’s educational and socio-emotional development. The implementation of collaboration models involving all significant parties was especially effective in enhancing adults’ knowledge of and participation in children’s lives, thereby achieving a consistent circle of support. The children also benefited from individualised school-based support, across both academic and socio-emotional dimensions.

UK policy has increasingly promoted early intervention and permanence planning for children who experience, or are at risk of experiencing, abuse or neglect, raising the question of whether these practices have actually increased ‘on the ground.’ There is already evidence of growing early intervention in the form of out of home care, in England as well as Australia and Canada. However, we do not yet know whether this trend also exists in Scotland. Furthermore, there is no research investigating whether rates of permanence planning have changed anywhere in the UK or globally. The current study addressed these gaps through a comparison of two samples of children in Scotland: 110 children born in 2003 and 117 born in 2013, all of whom were placed under compulsory measures of supervision prior to three years of age. The 2013 cohort was significantly more likely than the 2003 cohort to be removed from their parents at birth, to reside away from parents throughout the first three years of life and to live apart from parents at three years of age. Significantly more of the 2013 cohort than the 2003 cohort had a plan for permanence by three years. These findings are consistent with the view that policy changes in the UK are affecting practice (although practice changes may have resulted from other sources as well/instead). The fall in parental care was largely compensated by an increase in the use of foster care, which has resource implications. Children removed from their parents at birth were usually not returned in the first three years of life, not raised by extended family members, and were separated from one or more siblings. This typically reduced instability for young children, but also entailed substantial birth family fragmentation. The impact on children and families of early removal into foster care must therefore be carefully assessed in light of the increasing prevalence of this practice in Scotland and elsewhere.

In South Africa, hundreds of black, abandoned children enter the legal child care system on an annual basis and become eligible for adoption. Although these children have a right to be raised in their country of origin, they are often made available for intercountry adoption owing to a lack of prospective domestic adopters. Statistically, middle-class black South Africans present as a significant source of domestic adopters, but the number of black South Africans legally adopting abandoned children is small. A qualitative enquiry, using grounded theory, was conducted to establish what factors dissuade involuntarily childless black South Africans from legally adopting abandoned children. Personal interviews were conducted with 39 purposively selected black participants to gather data. The conclusion drawn is that five main factors dissuade black South Africans from adopting abandoned children: (1) meanings of kinship; (2) racial connotations associated with legal adoption; (3) conflicting Christian beliefs; (4) parenthood, gender and identity; and (5) empowered single women prioritising climbing the socio-economic ladder. Recommendations focus on social marketing strategies, policy and practice innovations and research to promote domestic adoption in the African context.