In this chapter my aim is to explore how children and young people in foster care talked about entering care for the first time, but also moving placements where this was required. The significance of entering foster care for the first time has been much discussed in the relevant literature (Sinclair 2005; Pithouse and Rees 2015). In addition, the difficult experience of moving placements has also been
discussed (Steinhauer 1991: xii; Harwin et al. 2001). Whilst entering foster care for the first time has been described as a very difficult and anxiety provoking experience for children, transitions between placements can also be ‘fraught’ (Sinclair 2005:60) with difficulty and dangers (O’Neill et al. 2012; Stott and Gustavsson 2009). The insights that I provide in this chapter both resonate with the extant literature but also make a modest contribution to extending our understanding of how children settle into care or cope with transition through the presentation of new empirical material and the connections I make between separation and attachment, identity formation and the language of children and young people in foster care.
The basics of attachment theory have already been used to examine attachments to birth parents in some cases of children and young people in foster care. The ‘emotional presence of the birth family, even after years of separation’ (Holland and Crowley 2013: 60) was confirmed in several of those cases. In this chapter attachment theory is used to help interpret some of the further effects of separation and loss. Whatever their experiences in early childhood, children and young people become temporarily separated from or endure permanent loss of their parents (Bowlby Vol. 2 1998) when they enter foster care.
The words ‘separation’ and ‘loss’ imply, as Bowlby points out, that ‘the subject’s attachment figure is inaccessible’ (Bowlby Vol. 2 1998: 42) and that does not necessarily mean physical inaccessibility but can also involve being ‘emotionally absent’ (Bowlby Vol. 2 1998: 43). For the purposes of this chapter, however, attention is given only to the physical inaccessibility created by being cared for away from the birth family. Given the limits of this study, focussing on the experience of foster care rather than on birth
137
family relationships, it is only possible to assume that emotional accessibility and its opposite may be among the factors implicated in differences between individual interviewees’ responses.
Separation from or loss of birth parents has been causally related ( Personen et al. 2008) to a range of physical and emotional symptoms in childhood and adulthood and these symptoms can include
separation anxiety, the feelings of concern and alarm elicited when there is real or threatened absence from an attachment figure (Cooklin et al.2014). A number of my interviewees expressed concern and alarm in connection with separation from their parents. However, separation anxiety is ‘well established’ as a part of all close personal relationships (Cooklin et al.2014) and although it is thought to be the most common source of psychological ill-health during childhood (Costello et al. 2011) it is not, therefore, always seriously damaging. There is, in fact, a range of possible applications of the term.
It will be convenient to make a further distinction between separation anxiety and ‘trauma’ as categories of analysis. Though there are wide definitions of trauma including any threats to personal integrity (Cairns and Fursland 2007) and therefore, by implication, separation anxiety can be considered traumatic. In this study, however, ‘trauma’ will refer only to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
There was one interviewee, Leo, who stated he experienced symptoms of PTSD, defined here as, ‘events ... involving actual or perceived harm or threat to the life or physical integrity of the child or of another individual (Briggs-Gowan et al. 2010). The core symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks (Ehlers et al.
2004) and it is not necessarily associated with separation at all. Since only Leo introduced himself as a victim of violence and gave vivid accounts of flashbacks, it will be convenient to make a distinction between the types of harm.
It is against this background of concern, alarm, anxiety and sometimes ill-health that the experiences of my interviewees will be explored. Without losing sight of ‘the crucial matter of resilience in childhood and its connections to social and psychological wellbeing’ (Pithouse and Rees 2015: 17), the chapter seeks
138
to build on the warning that, ‘[C]hildren’s sensitivity to the symbols, actions and expressions of adults, siblings and peers should not be underestimated. Children only too easily get the wrong messages’ (Bullock
et al. 1998: 96). The chapter explores the symbols, actions and expressions of foster care as they were perceived by the children and young people in foster care who participated in the study.
With the exception of Libby, who had only one placement, all my interviewees had experienced transitions between placements and it was an experience a number of them chose to tell me about, often in some detail. A minority of the sample had planned introductions (The Children Act 1989 Guidance and Regulations Volume 4: Fostering Services 3.5) to new placements and these will be detailed first. They will be followed by examination of the concerns during the early days of a new placement that were most frequently aired in interviews: their experiences of first arriving at a new placement (Mitchell et al. 2009); the task of seeking acceptance (Sinclair 2005:50); steps in getting to know carers and their wider families and the part played by household pets and animals (Mitchell et al.2009). Finally the chapter will turn to the positive and negative roles of foster siblings, looking at how they were understood by the young people in care (Berridge and Cleaver 1987; Quinton et al. 1998).
Institutional engagement for many people in foster care began with Local Authority interventions aimed at supporting the family in order to avoid having to take the young people into care. That
experience lies outside the scope of this study of long-term foster care and will be available for discussion, if at all, only as and when it was touched on by a participant. The starting point for this chapter is entry into foster care because that was often described.
The people in foster care whose experiences will be drawn on had for the most part been involved in several, in some cases many, new starts in different placements and for three there was also the
experience of going from foster care into adoption and then back into foster care again. The picture that results will be complicated, and probably made even more difficult to assimilate, in that, because the interviewees were all drawn from a single social work department, social workers’ and foster carers’
139
names crop up in relation to more than one child or young person in foster care. To simplify the reader’s task some of the basic adoption and foster carer information is gathered together in Appendix 5 where an attempt has been made to represent the foster care-adoption-foster care sequences in the relevant cases.
Introductions to placements
Arrival at a placement is usually, not always, a result of social worker interventions over a period and good practice for managing these transitions requires that:
….arrangements should be made for at least one introductory visit to the [first or transitional] foster home by the child and parent prior to the start of the
placement. Where time permits further visits lengthening in time should be made to allow carers and child to familiarise themselves and facilitate parental
involvement. The child will feel most comfortable in a placement when they feel that the parent has given them permission to be there.
(Northern County Council 2003:8).
This seems entirely appropriate. Where a child or young person is first taken into care under a care order parents share responsibility for deciding who looks after them, where they live and how they are educated (Gov.uk 2015). It is a preliminary measure to be followed up with individualised care in the foster placement but the accounts of the interviewees who talked about introductory meetings seem to suggest that it was a limited means of helping them to settle in.
One of my interviewees, Leona, reported what may have been an introduction to her first
140
she wanted to see what this girl was like”25. In this single case, parental permission was reported and does appear to have been valued by the child or young person entering foster care. The placement lasted two years and when it ended, for reasons that were never made clear, Leona moved to another placement which she saw as a stable, long-term solution to her situation. The lasting effect of the parental support for initial placement is impossible to determine but there is plenty of research evidence suggesting that it may have helped. Wilson et al.’s wide ranging review observed:
[P]urposeful, committed social work … promotes good contact between the birth parents, foster carers and the child, supports the foster carers and the birth parents and coordinates a multiagency approach to treatment of the child and parents before, during and after placement.
(Wilson et al. 2005:23).
Leona aside, however, none of the other interviewees described formal introductions on first placement. Though the circumstances that led to removal from home were not always described, and were never described in great detail, whenever an account was given it was nearly always of an emergency measure. Part of the abuse in Lilian’s family had come to light, posing a continuing threat to her and the other siblings. Abuse of the Lawson sisters was discovered when Lydia was hospitalised. Lucy lost the last vestiges of family care when her grandmother became ill. The Lambert brothers were causing such concern to neighbours that even an extended family composed of people who were “lethal weapons” was not enough to put neighbours off contacting social services. Leo was being violently attacked. In such circumstances the siblings in the study may have brought with them a range of emotions related to the trauma and loss they had experienced (Cameron and Maginn 2008). Yet the crisis that led up to separation in each case might have provided little scope for preliminary meetings. In most of the situations I learned
25
The account is ambiguous and it might be that the meeting between her mother and new foster parents took place as Leona moved in to the placement.
141
about, the shock of separation was often compounded by the unprepared encounter with strangers who, themselves, had little time to make ready.
Lilian, the three Lambert brothers and Leo were all introduced to one or more carer as a prelude to placement changes and it is from that ‘career’ stage that I now explore aspects of the preparatory work put in to matching children and carers.
At the start of Lilian’s fostering ‘journey’ she was removed from home and placed with her sister Luciana in the home of Carina Carter. The next two placements were with Connie and Cliff Mason and later with Catherine Cannon. Lilian’s social workers appear to have carried out the minimal requirements of good practice – a single introductory meeting with Connie and, when that placement was terminated, the same with Catherine. Lilian met Connie before the move “and she was great. I thought I love this I’m really going to bond with her” yet, for reasons that will be described when I consider the different experiences of first days in placement, her enthusiasm was replaced by anxiety immediately she arrived at the placement. The value of this introduction appears to have provided a useful temporary boost to her morale while she dealt with separation from Luciana, but no more.
Her preliminary meeting with Catherine also supported her, for a little longer in that case. “I met her first and we just bonded straight away. That was it. It just felt like I’d known her for ages.” Her social
worker was with her for that meeting and “we went away and Shelby [social worker] said ‘What do you think?’ I said ‘It’s great. Get me moving in there very soon.’ And I moved in like a couple of days later.” This glowing account was given to me some weeks after the move to Catherine’s and at that time things were still, apparently, going well but Lilian’s optimism was short lived in that case too. It buoyed her up but as was the case with Connie and Cliff, the third placement, too, became characterised by conflicts and ended in bitter recriminations.
142
The Lambert brothers probably had ad hoc introductions to two of their first three placements. The account Lawrence gave of his move to a first placement had a feeling of improvisation about it. The brothers travelled from home to grandmother to collect bags of toys before being taken on to the new carers. Together with Lucas’s comment that neighbours called in the social workers, the accounts appear to be of a hastily organised emergency placement (Rowe et al. 1989). Transition to the second placement was relatively smooth because the new carers, Emily and Steven, had been providing them with respite care for a considerable time. All parties knew each other well, there was mutual liking (Boddy 2013) and there was no need for introductory procedures. The third placement was short term and seems to have been unhappy for all concerned. The fourth placement, however, was arranged by a private sector fostering agency, Fosterwell Group, and there is evidence of more substantial arrangements for
introducing the brothers to potential new carers. Lucas talked of attending a party and Lee referred to, “Fosterwell Group things” they attended yet although Lee remembered, “me and Chad used to speak to each other [at the parties]” and Lucas too, remembered seeing Chad and Cathy at an event, the
connections formed at the party ‘things’ were limited:
I probably knew summat. I didn’t know them that much. I knew Chad ….but I don’t think I saw Cat. I … or I saw Chad before at Fosterwell Group but when I came here I forgot.
The disorganisation of Lee’s account makes it difficult to be clear what his experience was but it looks as if it involved relational uncertainty and confusion notwithstanding the preliminary contacts. Nor did Lucas make much of the ‘party-things’. He recognised Chad and Cathy when he arrived at the
placement but for him, the thing that helped was the chance to talk to Caitlin “because we were talking to her in the car” during a journey of around 50 miles. Even when considerable efforts were made, then, they seemed to be little more than a chance to screen out the poorest of matches. It was only when people in
143
foster care and carers began to live together that the strengths or weaknesses that were inherent in the match started to be discovered (Thomas 2001; Pithouse and Rees 2015).
Moving in
Neither does finding a child a “nice and kind” residential, foster or adoptive home automatically resolve some of the fears and anxieties. A child’s world can still be populated with apprehensions. To a child, what has happened before can also happen again. Each child of course, experiences their situation differently, but separation anxiety, sadness, guilt, fear or mistrust can impair their capacity to relate or attach to the foster family.
(Triseliotis, Sellick and Short:1995:117)
Whether going into care for the first time or entering the latest of a series of placements, the initial period in a new placement is a time of anxiety for people in foster care and although some of my
interviewees represented themselves as seasoned campaigners in the care system, familiarity did not always make newarrival easier to handle. Leo did not sleep the first night at his twenty-fourth placement 26
. That he had to give up his bed to his brother because Luke had been sick on his own bed only
underscored the predictable distress of the experience. Luke was, “usually sick when he moves.” To put this in perspective, the degree of placement instability Leo and Luke had known was at the upper end among this group of people in foster care so it is not being suggested that his account is typical but nor is it unique. Looking at a photograph of herself on the day she moved from foster care into her adoptive family Lanie recalled being sick that day. All those who described entering a new placement looked back on the experience as very difficult. The word most often used was ‘hard’ as in, “it’s hard when you’ve just started”
26
144
and what Leo’s comment underlines is that people in foster care are not de-sensitised to the intense anxieties by repeat moves, a consistent theme in the messages from children and young people in foster care.
The evidence that will be considered here supports the view of Triseliotis et al. (1995) above that the usual efforts of social service departments to find appropriate foster homes cannot automatically resolve all the concerns the child or young person in foster care brings with them. It appears from the experiences drawn upon here that arriving in a new foster placement aggravates anxieties temporarily or, in some circumstances, more lastingly. However, Lilian’s quest to, “Feel part of the family instead of just shutting us out” or, as Lia put it, to find a, “Proper home, settled in” are not impossible dreams and some interviewees (over relatively long periods) clearly felt themselves wanted in foster care. These feelings, their origins and supports will be considered next before turning attention to the many factors that made stable, long-term placements very much a minority experience among my participants.
First days in placement – separation and attachment
Lawrence Lambert remembered the very first moments and days in care as being:
… very scary because I was living with another family and even if they were going to look after me I really was really nervous and strange…
This straightforward recollection draws into association some of the basic features of interest to attachment theory. The frightening effect of a combination of strangeness, strangers and fear is a prominent motif in Bowlby’s writing.
He discusses the fear of strangers in infants at length, referring to extensive literature and research devoted to the conjunction of factors. The evidence explored in that literature is complex but the
145
[T]he more strange the surroundings and the people…the more frightened a child