Surviving and Thriving in Care and Beyond

Personal and Professional Perspectives

Sara Barratt, Wendy Lobatto, Sara Barratt, Wendy Lobatto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367103477
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429919565
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is a book about children who have to grow up apart from their biological parents, the impact of this on their lives and on those who look after them, and how we can respond to the challenges this poses in order that they can grow and develop in healthy directions. It provides a systemic framework to describe working with children and adults who are or have been in care or adopted, as well as working with their adoptive parents and carers, highlighting their own narratives and those of professionals working with them. The authors have tried to make space for multiple voices to speak and describe aspects of the care system and life beyond. There are contributions from those who have been brought up away from their biological parents, their adoptive parents and foster or kinship carers. There are also contributions from researchers and professionals with expertise in working with children in substitute care, who describe their theoretical and clinical approaches, privileging the voices of those with whom they work.

Part I
Overview of the Social, Political, and Clinical Context for Alternative Family Care

Chapter One

Family placement: continuity and discontinuity over time

John Simmonds

Ten years ago, I drafted a note to myself.

“My adopted son has just turned eighteen and finished his A-levels. He is currently on a gap year and due to start at university next year studying ‘Product Design’. His plans for this year are to train as a chef. This marks a long-standing ambition of his. His flow in the kitchen is quite remarkable to the benefit of the family that can have a Jamie Oliver meal on a Monday night. His kitchen cleaning skills are not quite so remarkable. On the cooking front, his girlfriend is undoubtedly outclassed—in fact none of his friends can compete with him in this area. He has recently been taken on as an assistant chef at one of our local well-known modern European restaurants in London after a short trial.

“In a fairly academically orientated family, his flair and motivation in the kitchen stand out and as with many families, the question is asked ‘Where does this come from?’ Is it his early life experience of watching Ready, Steady, Cook or indeed being given Jamie Oliver cookbooks as presents? All of this might be true, but can’t explain why he took to actually cooking rather than just passively watching the TV programmes as many of his friends have done. Did he pick it up from us? Well not really—my wife can turn out an excellent meal but like many working families, this tends to be on special occasions rather than Monday nights. And cooking was not something that his school prized or encouraged at all.

“It might not come as a complete surprise to hear that his birth mother was a cook. He knows this but I am not clear what this means to him. Is this his way of staying in contact with her emotionally—he hasn’t had any contact with her given he was adopted 18 years ago so this does seem a bit far-fetched. Is this something that he has inherited from her? This also seems a bit but not completely far-fetched. In one way the explanation doesn’t really matter—he needs to fulfil his own ambitions, build on his aptitudes and energise his motivations. Who he takes after in this respect and where this comes from is interesting and sometimes emotionally charged but if he ‘finds himself’ over the next few years, then that is what I want for him.”

Where are we now? My son graduated as planned. University was a bit up and down as it probably is for most undergraduates. The process of finding oneself in the late teenage years and early twenties is complex—highs and lows, uncertainties and anxieties, achievements and successes. One success among a number of others was being employed to run a small cafeteria on campus that reinforced the cooking ambition. It was a downside, if not a nightmare, to graduate at a time of economic crisis. However, an opportunity to be employed as a chef at a “pop up restaurant” averted the problem that thousands of other graduates were experiencing and that was quickly followed by a fairly lengthy period of employment as a chef at a well-known restaurant in the West End of London. It was a period of learning, challenge, and exhaustion—a life of afternoon/evening and weekend hours is not the most familial or socially conducive.

How does this personal story connect with the theme of this chapter? First, this is the story of an adoption of its time and maybe has little direct connection with what I know about adoption today (Simmonds, 2012). Our experience was rooted in a particular social structure where illegitimacy was still subject to stigma, resources to support single parenthood accompanied by significant ambivalence, and adoption agencies were geared up to place babies quickly when they were relinquished by their birth parents. It was also an era that had just emerged from the view that “secrecy” was best and adoption should be thought of as similar to “born to family life”. Telling children that they were adopted had started to be accepted as necessary and being open about origins was regarded as helpful. In some circumstances, there might even be communication and the exchange of information through “letterbox contact” (Howe et al., 2003; Triseliotis et al., 2005). Similar issues were being raised about children in foster care and their understanding of why they were in care and what the plans for them were. Research by Rowe (1983, 1984; Rowe et al., 1989) identified serious issues resulting from the lack of openness and clarity in these placements, which amounted to “drift”. These issues reflect significant themes in adoption and all other types of family placement: that of continuity and discontinuity, the many questions that arise about how individuals, families, and society address their thoughts and feelings between the past, present, and future. Where did I come from? Who am I? Why did this happen? Could something have been done then that would have prevented me from finding myself in the position I am today (Harris, 2006, 2008, 2012)? This chapter explores the complexity of establishing continuity in the context of discontinuity within the changing professional and social discourses that influence policy, practice, and family life.

Issues of continuity and discontinuity are fundamental to our experience. There is little doubt that the pathway of family life is marked by the need for continuity. Indeed, its strength is seen as the continuity of relationships throughout life in providing stability, commitment, and protection. Adults undoubtedly benefit from this continuity and it is a key underpinning of marriage, civil partnership, or non-legally framed long-term relationships. Children, in particular, require continuity. This theme has been well and deeply articulated through the concept of attachment (Bowlby, 1968, 2005). The emotional and social connection between young children and their parents (and, indeed, a small number of other adults over time), driven by sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of the child at its core, is profoundly important. This is the secure base for building children’s sense of who they are, their connection with the world around them, and their confidence to explore that world. However, we know that there is much more to it than this. Continuity might be desirable in adult and child relationships but discontinuity is likely to be a significant experience. Indeed, the rates of divorce bring us close to having to regard continuity as unusual in adult relationships and family life. However, this is only one part of recognising that change, dislocation, uncertainty, and loss are a core part of human experience and the secure psychosocial base that lies at the heart of attachment enables us to address these feelings.

As important as attachment has become as a core concept in understanding child development, there are many factors that promote the healthy development of children and these are subject to lengthy and complex debate. No one concept can do justice to the variables involved, especially when there is complex interaction between what happens inside people, what happens between them, and what happens when they are members of groups (Sroufe, 2005). As much as the study of child development has become a serious and substantial scientific subject, it cannot avoid the deeply embedded value issues or choices that human beings make when striving to create meaning in a social world. Over a generation, the Western world has shifted its perspective from identifying heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family as the only foundation for healthy development. There are many other family forms, which are socially sanctioned and which offer both benefits and challenges to their members and to society as a whole, where there continue to be dominant discourses about how families should be. These are discussed by Julia Granville in Chapter Fourteen.

Taking too limited a historical perspective on individual development and family life is unhelpful, as the greater span of human development indicates the significant adaptability of human beings to the changing physical and social environment. There are two key themes in this. First, co-operation is necessary for procreation and the survival of the species in creating the next generation. Second, co-operation enables human beings to respond to threats or challenges in the environment to ensure that our species survives. The capacity to adapt, to be flexible, to learn from experience, to transmit what has been learnt to other people and to the next generation, plays a huge part in the capacity to survive. The key significant issue in this is the development of the capacity of human beings to co-operate and to trust (Fonagy & Allison, 2014; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Sperber et al., 2010). The ability of one individual to work with another individual or group is central to survival, with trust being a key component. The combined efforts of people to respond to, and solve, a new challenge or threat is usually significantly better than where the problem is worked on by just one person, but working with other people requires appropriate levels of trust based on experience and a belief that this is a safe and effective strategy. The need to co-operate to survive often means dealing with the possible threats posed by other people, whether these are individuals, small groups, or whole populations.

Learning to co-operate is a complex psychosocial activity that involves balancing the pursuit of self-interest with the belief that fulfilling the needs of the other is not a threat but an advantage. Trust is difficult to reliably establish when it is based on a single experience that might be transitory. In most situations, trust develops through experience repeated over time. For a child who has experienced unpredictable parenting, it takes time for him to trust that his carers will be there when he needs them and, for example, provide food when he is hungry. Tensions and anger can erupt at mealtimes and patience and calm predictability are required before children can begin to rely on the adults around them. Successfully negotiating these events over time is important to the establishment of a trusting relationship. Repetition binds people together and the absence of trust will become a major issue in the continuity of relationships and all social groupings. When it becomes established, it is of such importance and value that it is defended through complex psychosocial processes, which extend to every aspect of life, such as believing that your parent or carer will be there when you expect them to be. Experience, belief, and trust established over time, become embedded in institutions. This is an important part of survival; human beings need to create joint memory that serves the function of releasing them from continuously having to rediscover and re-create trusting and reliable structures that enable them to survive.

Whether as individuals, groups, families, or communities, co-operation is enabled by identification with others unified by nationality, religion, culture, language, or location. We co-operate with people we believe to be the same as we are. If we are not sure about this, they might pose a threat. This might not be immediately obvious and might not even be true, but so important is the need to survive that it would be foolhardy to ignore it. At times of danger, our instinct tells us that we need to know who our friends are and these are most likely to be the people that are “like us”. As uncomfortable as this might be when it becomes the source of racism, religious intolerance, or other forms of discrimination or oppression, what individuals, groups, and whole communities might do when they are threatened cannot be lightly dismissed under pleas of tolerance or understanding. Adaptability comes with the price of a deeply embedded capacity to both defend and attack. These factors lie at the heart of many issues in family placement. Maltreatment may be thought of as a fundamental breach of trust between the child and their parents. Removing the child might be necessary to protect them but might, for the child, indicate a further source of danger with unknown people and, therefore, can elicit a heightened need for self-protection through attacking the new parent figures. The process of resolving these issues and establishing a workable new family are, furthermore, likely to be full of uncertainty and delay. The child’s capacity to trust could be the over-arching casualty and, even when a resolution is being approached, might continue to present painful feelings for the child and her carers: for example, mealtimes might continue to be a source of tension because these processes become activated.

Co-operation, then, relies on an individual’s belief that “the other” is a source of help and support and not a threat. Trust in the other cannot be naïvely assumed; making sense of one’s own mind and the minds of others needs to be reliable, accurate, and insightful. The room for error is significant because human perception and judgement is fallible: misunderstandings occur, accidents happen, and threats are perceived and might be real. Prior experience is likely to play a key part, as the example above of children in care and the anxiety and tensions around mealtimes illustrates. The recent development of the concept of reflective functioning (Aber et al., 1985; Slade, 2005; Steele et al., 2008) has been particularly important in articulating this. Reflective functioning recognises the unique capacity of the human mind to accept and understand that relating to others means learning that:

• the minds of other people are opaque: “Sometimes, I can’t quite understand what she wants. She seems to be hungry but any suggestion I make about food seems to spark off a mixture of fear and anger—or at least that is what I think it is”;
• one’s own mind is difficult to understand: “I am not sure that I really know what I feel about her when this happens. Am I too sensitive in just wanting to be seen as a good mum?”;
• mental states change, and change over time: “I was feeling very upset about what happened at supper yesterday but having thought about it, I can see why mealtimes are so stressful for you”;
• the process of relating influences mental states: “I feel very upset about what has just happened but maybe we can talk about it when you have calmed down a bit to see if we can sort this out.”

It is important that parents and carers can facilitate children to understand that their mental states are opaque, subject to change, change over time, and are influenced by others during the process of relating. Subjectively, children need to experience their own minds as a reasonably safe place that they can trust in steering them through the world, using opportunity, experiencing the challenge of learning, managing risk and threat, adapting to new circumstances, and facing transition and loss. In turn, their own experience and development will set them on a path to being able to relate to the minds of others. Being able to co-operate and work together is the outcome, which drives adaptability and the capacity to survive. When children have been maltreated, there are serious issues in rebuilding the capacity to trust and the mental processes that enable this.

The threat in family placement

Family placement across the board finds itself embroiled in complex issues of survival, threat, adaptability, and co-operation. As one example, on 27 May 2015, the Daily Mail published a piece in which Denise Robertson, their agony aunt, “after a lengthy investigation”, “reveals the ‘rotten’ side of the adoption system in Britain”. The investigation was based on 450 letters received over the previous year “from desperate families”. The headline identifies the piece as the “Blood-chilling scandal of the thousands of babies stolen by the State” (Robertson, 2015) There could not be a more direct evocation of the perceived threat that the state poses to some families in removing their children to be placed for adoption. It is difficult to square the claims of this article with the framework of law that governs the adoption system. The European Convention on Human Rights is central to this, with two key Articles providing an overarching framework to ensure that the state acts fairly and justly. Article 6 establishes the right to a fair trial and Article 8, the right to respect for one’s private and family life, one’s home, and one’s correspondence, with no interference with this right by a public authority except in very specific circumstances. This is supported by various judgements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). It is important in the way that domestic le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I OVERVIEW OF THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND CLINICAL CONTEXT FOR ALTERNATIVE FAMILY CARE
• PART II EXAMPLES OF CLINICAL WORK WITH CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
• PART III THE VOICES OF ADULTS WHO HAVE BEEN ADOPTED OR EXPERIENCED THE CARE SYSTEM EITHER AS CHILDREN OR AS THOSE WHO ARE CURRENTLY PARENTING CHILDREN
• INDEX