At the IFCO seminar in London last month, Jackie Sanders, from the Fostering Network gave a presentation looking at how foster care had developed in the UK from the 1970s to now. The contrast was striking and the lessons learned are particularly important for people, like me, working on setting up foster care systems, helping them avoid the same pitfalls.
In the 1970s, providing foster care was done voluntarily with no training or significant support offered to families that stepped up. Ms Sanders described the approach as ‘just add another potato’. In other words, just another mouth to feed, no regards for a child’s traumatic background or challenging behaviour.
This has changed over time. Foster carers are now provided with training and support. They are increasingly recognised as experts, rather than ‘merely parents’. The majority of foster carers receive pay, to allow them to focus on the child in their care, though pay is not high. And while originally foster care was almost exclusively the domain of women, men are increasingly involved in it now.
However, despite significant improvements, there are still a lot of problems and dangers lying along the road. Spending cuts, leading to overburdening of the social workforce and reduced training and support for foster carers plays a major role in this. One of the problems that Ms Sanders pointed out, was that the politicians in charge of the budget for alternative care and other services for children, are generally not the same people who are responsible for picking up the bill when things go wrong down the line because of insufficient intervention or support early on. These costs can include those involved in young people getting entangled in the judicial system, needing benefits because of long-term unemployement or ill health, mental health problems, possibly leading to substance abuse, and adults struggling to cope and unable to care for their children, who then end up in care in their turn.
So while investement in early intervention and support can save enormous amounts of money over the course of the child’s lifetime, politicians tend to only think in the short-term and are not concerned with money paid by different departments from their own. And with this narrow-minded view, budget cuts to supportive services are presented as ‘saving money’, while in fact they are actively creating a situation that will involve easily predictable and very high costs.
One other thing that Ms Sanders brought up that I think is important to mention, is the need to allow children to maintain relationships with previous foster families. Too often, both children and foster families are prevented from keeping in touch when a child has been moved to another family.
Social workers claim that this is to help the child settle in and attach better in the new family. As Ms Sanders put it so well: suddenly, there is this idea that the child is only able to love one person at a time. This really makes no sense, and it can in fact be very damaging to the child. It can cause additional trauma, because if a previous foster family is not allowed to be in contact with the child, the child is likely to feel that he has been forgotten about and that the foster family did not care about him. This in turn can quickly be taken as proof by the child that he is ‘unlovable’, because after all, he was ‘abandonded’ once again.
Again, this is a case where people really need to think more about the long-term consequences of their decisions and policies, and to take into account the impact on the child.
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