At the IFCO Seminar in London, last month, IFCO President Danielle Douglas held a talk about where she feels foster care and kinship care are heading, particularly in a global perspective. During this talk she brought up many important points such as the need for more data, the need to take include marginalised children in planning and building of services and the importance of deinstitutionalisation. However, for this blog, I want to lift out a particular topic that she raised, one that is ignored far too often: taking into account the rights and needs of ALL different actors in the fostering relationship.
In most cases, when people think about the actors in a fostering relationship, they think about the foster child, the foster parents (or carers), and the social worker involved. Occasionally the child’s birth family is included, but that is pretty much where it ends. This is not only the case when people ‘think’ about the fostering relationship, but more importantly also when they plan, make policy and set up services. Of course, the people mentioned are very important actors within the fostering relationship, but they are very far from being the only people involved or affected.
Other people might include teachers, family members of the child, friends of the child, family members of the foster family, a sports coach, dance teacher or other people involved in the child’s leisure activities, possibly medical professionals and people in the various support services assigned to the child and both families. All these people need to be taken into account. They may need to have a certain amount of information about the child’s situation, to be able to best support the child. And they may need support themselves to be able to support the child, to be able to do their job as they are supposed to with the child in the mix and possibliy even to cope with the situation personally.
The system should incorporate policies and mechanisms to help meet the needs and the rights of all these people. Both for the sake of those people themselves, and for the sake of the child, because the child’s needs will be better met if the people around her are in a position to meet them.
One very important group that is often overlooked in planning and making support available is the biological or adopted children already living in the foster family or kinship care family. Having a child with a traumatic background join the family, inevitably is going to have a great impact on everyone in that family. The parents of the family will have made a conscious decision to take this on, but their children are not always part of that decision making process and if they are, they usually are not quite able to fully understand the implications.
The biological and adopted children in a foster family have rights of their own, which we all have an obligation to meet. However, even if we brush that aside for a moment – as unfortunately happens far too often – and only focus on the foster child, it is STILL essential to make sure that the needs and rights of the biological and adopted children in the foster family are respected and met. Because if they are not, it is highly likely that an untenable situation will be created, one which is very likely to lead to a placement breakdown for the foster child.
In other words, the foster child’s rights and needs are not being met if those of the other children in the family are not being met. And the same goes for the other important people in the child’s life.
Going forward, it is essential to take a very broad view of alternative care, including foster care and kinship care, taking into account all the important relationships in a child’s life. Because if we don’t, the chances of good outcomes become significantly smaller.
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