The Lives of Foster Carers

Private Sacrifices, Public Restrictions

Linda Nutt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415358125
• eBook ISBN: 9781134246014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

The Lives of Foster Carers analyzes the contradictions, conflicts, and ambiguities experienced by foster carers arising from the inter-penetrations of public bureaucracy and private family life. Topics covered include:

• social policy pertinent to childcare
• the history of foster care service
• available literature on the experience of foster carers
• public versus private domains in foster care
• motivations and roles of foster carers
• how foster carers perceive themselves and their foster children.

Based on a wide range of literature and in-depth interviews with forty-six foster carers, this book provides a valuable insight into the concerns, processes and experiences of foster carers in the UK. Jargon free and accessible, it will appeal to foster carers, practitioners, students and academics in social care, youth work and childcare as well as policy makers in children's services.

1
What do we know about foster carers?

The applied social research

Foster families and their homes are the favoured option and primary location for the delivery of service for children looked after by the local authority. Yet as Berridge (1997) identifies, the foster care service remains under-theorised whilst Sinclair and colleagues note that, although most UK councils have special fostering schemes for teenagers, they ‘typically lack the elaborate justifications of their North American counterparts’ (2004:9).

To set the context for an analysis of the foster carer world, this chapter reviews the social research literature on foster care with particular focus on the carers themselves. Included is a brief outline of social policy pertinent to child care, plus a short history of the growth of foster care as a resource for looking after other people’s children. A background description explains how the foster care service is situated within local authorities, with some information on the several administrative classifications of carers. The chapter also reviews what is known about the characteristics of foster carers and concludes by looking at the literature that seeks to faithfully reflect the foster carers’ own views, perceptions and explanations about how they make sense of their role. Overall it summarises the current social research knowledge about the foster carer’s environment.

There is a close connection between the histories of childhood and of social policy pertaining to children in the UK as the development of child welfare law frequently mirrors changing social attitudes. Ideologies concerning child care in this country can be contradictory. When families function without criticism children are regarded as a private responsibility and motherhood is defined as a personal choice, but when families are considered dysfunctional the state will intervene on the basis that children are a public responsibility.

The current preferred state provision for children who cannot live with their own families is to place them with substitute/foster families, generally to be looked after by a female carer. Child-care norms, corresponding to national statistics, are that most children’s primary carer is the mother so this would appear to confirm that the state’s general choice meets societal expectations. However, in order that she can be available for this purpose most women need to be dependent upon a wage-earning partner, and it could thus be argued that child welfare policies which support this arrangement are entrenched in pre-existing beliefs and structures of female caring, part of which are women dependent upon male partners in ‘traditional’ families.

Since the 1970s there has been much political rhetoric about ‘supporting the family’, though past underfunding in public expenditure for expectations regarding health, social security and welfare have failed to keep up with demand. Partly as a consequence and in order to fill this gap, the principle that women are their families’ carers has become enshrined in community care and the development of social work. This has underpinned arguments that, in the past, social policies have upheld particular values, normally in favour of men, and thus maintained major inequalities between the sexes.

Although at a macro level an analysis of state policies demonstrates that they do maintain and reinforce traditional patterns of gender beliefs, this may be an unintended consequence. It is easier for men to present ‘legitimate excuses’ as to why they are not able to provide care for others. Nevertheless, in effect, state social policies operate within a set of assumptions that are gender biased with the result that, usually, women act as unpaid carers within the home. There is thus a substantial literature that argues that state policies assume and prescribe a traditional nuclear family in which women are the main carers and that there are assumptions about the nuclear family as the preferred norm.

The family, however, is continuously being shaped by wider, outside structural forces so that modifications in family life cannot be separated either from other social changes, or from shifts within the sphere of intimacy. Daily life is consequently closely related to politics whilst policy also occurs in micro settings. Families do not react only to stmctural changes or to state policy; family members also have their own agency.

But how much agency do individual foster carers enjoy? Their daily life is prescribed by statute, by bureaucracy and by the custom and practice of social services departments. They have felt the demanding effect of the practice guidelines of the 1989 Children Act. Based on a series of research projects, the Act is couched in terms of a service to the children’s birth families, not to the needs of foster carers’ domestic lives, and was derived from the concerns of professional child welfare specialists. Its three main principles (the wishes of the child, non-intervention and joint parenting) have all ensured that the foster carer’s task has become increasingly testing. Foster carer life has been further challenged by diminishing residential alternatives for the most difficult children, together with decreasing local authority budgets. As a result there are more troubled children under more adverse circumstances needing to be looked after in foster families and, in effect, this means by female carers. Ideologies concerning women and caring are so entrenched that they can lead to taken-for-granted assumptions: systems may thus depend upon socially invisible female work. A foster ‘system of care’ depends upon the work of women within the private domain, and this chapter seeks to discover how visible, or invisible, is the work of foster carers.

The history of foster care can be traced to biblical references to children cared for by unrelated adults. Historians also posit that growing up in another (foster) family may have been common early in the first millennium. There is evidence that, not infrequently, Viking children were raised in more noble families whilst medieval parents, where appropriate, arranged for their sons to be brought up in a family of the guild to which they were apprenticed. Colton (1998) refers to both abandoned children, and those of the affluent, being cared for by wet nurses during the Middle Ages in France, whilst English sixteenth-century records note that young orphans were placed with nurses. The formal boarding out of poor children in England, however, was first legalised by Hanway’s Act of 1767.¹ This was later overtaken by, primarily Victorian, institutional provision which organised basic physical care for destitute children in line with the 1834 Poor Law’s prevailing principles concerning the care of needy children.

A Report of a Drawing-room Conference on Boarding-Out Pauper Children (1876) documents the inception of the institutional form of foster care. ‘Deserving’ children might be rescued from the Work House to be boarded out with private families. The report indicates that fostering was a means of cutting the (escalating) cost of poor relief and a means of instilling the ‘right’ values in children by, for example, preparing them for work. This primary source gives the origins of the state foster care system, revealing that, in many ways, the issues remain the same. Gradually, during the nineteenth century, fostering came to be regarded as a charitable act; a means of rescuing children and placing them with substitute families with no thought of reunification. It was considered a long-term commitment and the use of the word foster ‘parent’ indicates the surrogate nature of the role. Parker (1990) refers to a ‘child saving movement’ and traces the history of foster care through the nineteenth century as a response to dual needs: a belief that, although male children could fend for themselves within the Work House, young girls should be protected from this, together with a perceived middle-class need for better-trained female domestics. Interest in the scheme accelerated when, in the twentieth century, it became clear that fostering was cheaper than the upkeep of institutions.

During the Second World War, large-scale evacuation of children brought to national attention both an increased public awareness of their needs together with an official concern for those without a ‘normal’ home life. The death of Dennis O’Neill in 1945 from neglect and abuse by his foster parents led to the Curtis Committee official inquiry which exposed the low standard of foster care supervision by unqualified Poor Law Officers. Its 1946 report recommendations laid the foundations for a professional child-care service and argued in favour of fostering as the best form of substitute care since the children ‘bore a different stamp of developing personality and despite occasional misfits were manifestly more independent’ (Curtis Report, 1946).

This was supported by the Home Office, then responsible for child care, because ‘boarding out is the least expensive method both in money and in manpower and…it is imperative to exercise the strictest economy consistent with a proper regard for the interests of the children’ (Home Office, cited by Bebbington and Miles, 1990:284).

The 1948 Children Act acknowledged the importance of fostering as a child-care resource, set up the new Children’s Departments and shifted the balance to recognise that children could be returned to their families. Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love, published in 1953, lent further support for fostering (rather than residential care) when he identified the importance of meeting children’s emotional needs via an exclusive maternal bond. Consequently, not only were increasing numbers of children placed in foster families in times of crisis but fostering became regarded as a ‘natural’ activity for women, and one that required little or no special training. As a result the culture of many foster families was to continue to offer substitute, rather than complementary, parenting with no regard for the children’s birth families.

The Seebohm Report (Great Britain: Committee and Allied Personal Social Services, 1968) recommended the amalgamation of three local authority departments, Mental Health, Welfare and Children, into one social service department. Against the gains was a child-care loss with the dispersion of the expertise which for 20 years had supervised children in foster families.

Thus, mainly for financial reasons, the underlying principles of foster care have become care in the community rather than in an institution, together with a bid to give children the ordinary ‘normal’ family life it is presumed to provide (Packman, 1993). Homes which, in the perceptions of those organising the placements, most closely conformed to what Packman refers to as their ‘bourgeois ideal’, giving preference to a working father and a fully available mother. This is a stereotype which, as Sinclair and colleagues (2004) note, survives as current foster care households continue to reflect the selectors’ conservative standpoint.

During the 1970s fostering was predominantly for young children whilst adolescents were cared for in children’s homes. However, a crisis of confidence in residential provision during the 1980s, caused by low morale and the detection of instances of institutional maltreatment, resulted in government pressure to increase the supply of foster families, particularly as a cheaper alternative. This was a policy encouraged by the Audit Commission who recorded that ‘the potential for improving value for money by increasing the percentage of children placed with foster parents continues to exist’² (1985:2). This, together with a fundamental child-care tenet that every child has a right to ‘normal family life’, meant that fostering became part of institutionalised welfare.

Successive child-care policies and their underpinning legislation were rethought with the Children Act, 1989. This had a marked effect upon foster care. The Act’s overarching principles are the paramountcy of the welfare of the child, the duty of public authorities to support families and children, a preference for negotiated solutions rather than court orders and the concept of enduring parental responsibility. The term ‘parental rights’ was replaced by ‘parental responsibilities’ which remain even when children live elsewhere, for example with a foster family. Thus, in many cases, the foster carer becomes pivotal as s/he may have to actively consult and negotiate with parents about decisions affecting the child. The duty of the foster carer is that s/he should:

care for the child as if he [sic] were a member of the foster parents’ [sic] own family, and…promote his welfare having regard to the local authority’s long and short term arrangements for the child.

(Department of Health, 1991:140)

Shaw and Hipgrave (1989a) document the change of nomenclature from foster ‘parent’ to foster ‘carer’. Since the mid-1970s the UK has witnessed the development of specialist fostering initiatives and they suggest that this name-shift was in recognition of carers’ skills and expertise. Yet there remains some ambivalence in official documents which continue to refer to foster ‘parents’.³ The Fostering Network (NFCA, 1987a) recommends foster ‘carers’ in order to underline the difference for the child and to reinforce the continuing role of birth parents. This indistinctness in government terminology is indicative of a much wider ambiguity regarding the foster carers, which will be discussed in later chapters.

The original nineteenth-century assumption that divorcing children from their origins was the great panacea has changed. It is now considered that many of these children have problems even after their ‘rescue’. They are seen, not as ‘children without families’, but as ‘children from families with problems’. Social work belief is that effective work with children should take into account their origins, family networks and cultural environments, a notion generated by ecological theory, and that the child placed away is a product or ‘symptom’ of a dysfunctional interaction between the family and its environment. Thus any help should involve the whole family. Foster carers are centrally placed for the aspirations of this ecological perspective. In theory they are no longer substitute parents but more an extension of family support. The definition of a ‘child of the family’ in the Children Act excludes a child living with foster carers, thus reinforcing the view of fostering as a temporary arrangement. Yet, at the same time, the foster carer is responsible for all the common experiences associated with children’s lives: peer relationships, opportunities for school achievement, community activities and an ‘ordinary family setting’. Foster care is about providing a ‘normal’ life.

Local authority child welfare services provide a continuum of family placement from short-term fostering through to long-term permanency and on to adoption. In a bid to include all foster carers, Colton and Williams’ discussion of an international description produces a ‘somewhat clumsy working definition’. They suggest:

‘Foster care’ is care provided in the carers’ home, on a temporary or permanent basis, through the mediation of a recognised authority, by specific carers, who may be relatives or not, to a child who may or may not be officially resident with the foster carers.

(1997:48)

Foster carers can either be friends, extended family or stranger carers to the child. The 1989 Children Act encourages the use of family and friends before those recruited by the local authority.⁴ Families who care for kin children cannot expect financial help as a right. Rhodes posits that the resources offered to kin carers are restricted in order to uphold the notion of kinship obligation and family responsibility. As she comments: ‘Foster care exposes…contradictory expectations at their starkest’ (Rhodes, 1995:182). Stranger foster carers are at least reimbursed a set amount for the child’s expenses.⁵

In England anyone can apply to be a foster carer, although they must undergo a rigorous assessment process before being approved. Once registered with their local authority, all foster carers, including those working with an IFP, are then expected to work ‘in partnership’ with social services staff in order to care for the child(ren) placed with them. Although the term ‘partnership’ is not found in the legislation it is laid out in the 1989 Children Act Guidance, though an official comment notes, ‘Arrangements between carers and authorities would be improved if foster carers are treated as full partners’ (Utting, 1997:28).

In order to understand the part that foster carers play it is important to consider the organisational and institutional setting within which foster care is delivered. Children placed by social services departments with registered foster carers are children in state care. In Britain the local authorities have some freedom to define policy and to fix budgets as they deliver most services, so there is considerable variability in both the structure of foster care services and its terminology. In addition, different parts of the United Kingdom have their own history of welfare and their own legislative systems so that there are differences between the component countries.

Alongside these differences the focus of the social workers’ concerns has modified from decade to decade. In the 1960s there was an emphasis on preventing reception into care which, after a series of scandals, changed during the 1970s. Public condemnation following the death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather, after she had been removed by the court from a rela-tive foster placement, resulted in an increase in the numbers of children removed from their families.

There is evidence that the characteristics of the children in foster care have become progressively more challenging over the years. Early adversity frequently results in difficult behaviours. They might steal, break things, have tantrums, refuse to eat, smear walls, wet their beds, refuse to bath, continually defy their carers, set light to their bedding, take overdoses, make sexual advances to other children, expose themselves in public, make false allegations, attack others, truant, take drugs or get into trouble with the police’ (Sinclair et al., 2004:4). The 1975 Children Act produced another shift within the care system: a belief in psychological parenting resulting in the concept of ‘professional’ or ‘specialist’ fostering and expectations of ‘treatment’ for the children. The aim of specialist schemes was to ensure that children would not just be ‘looked after’ but that an additional ingredient would in some way ameliorate their characters and their attitudes.

Shaw and Hipgrave’s survey (1983) of specialist foster care schemes revealed that social services were not offering the carers any career, pay or support services and that foster care had become the dumping ground for inappropriate and unplanned placements. Rushton’s review (1989) confirmed that foster carers received little support. He describes them as exploited, treated insensitively with inadequate help and in need of a counselling service to manage rejection from children. There was little or no training on safer caring⁶ or on how to handle disclosure of abuse. He also underlines the need to determine the status of foster carers within social service departments. This is confirmed by Sellick (1994) who found that foster carers’ most frequent complaints related to the social workers, both with regard to the children and to themselves. He concludes that successful fostering depends upon good rapport between the parties and observes the need for praise and reassurance since the local authority expects so much accountability in return. Even today there is always a presumption that foster carers are available, often at short notice, to take in children and attend meetings or court. It is assumed that they will accept a multitude of additional tasks, for example the assessment of children, contact with the birth families in the foster home, supporting the family whilst the child is with them and often assisting young people after they leave. Yet Colton (1998) comments that many foster carers are still treated, by social services staff, as service recipients rather than as service providers.

In order to assist carers, local authorities now provide Family Placement social workers who, in their support of the placement, proffer help, advice and training to the foster carers. Triseliotis and colleagues’ study of fostering in Scotland (1998) confirms earlier findings of general satisfaction with this part of the social care department. The UK National Standards for Foster Care (NFCA, 1999) recommend that these workers are called Supervising Social Workers in order to underline the growing expertise of the foster care service as it moves away from a body of well-meaning and untrained volunteers/foster carers to more specialist schemes supported by dedicated, trained personnel. As with many of the caring organisations, a contemporary trend in foster care has been its own professionalisation. Foster carers, as well as demonstrating the individual concern of a parent, have also to behave as though foster children are a professional responsibility; ‘looking after someone else’s child as though s/he is your own’ (DHSS, 1955:14) is no longer enough. As noted, most foster children have considerable needs and display challenging behaviours; their carers must work alongside staff from the courts, special education and health. In his Appendix A, Sellick (1992) lists some 30 skilled tasks that carers need to perform adequately since fostering encompasses children with many different needs; foster carers have to be ‘parents plus’.⁷ A report looking at the education of children within the looked-after system lists 14 complex tasks expected of foster carers (SSI/OFSTED, 1995), for example assessing the child’s developmental needs across a range of circumstances. Although local authority specialist schemes include a fee-paying element, the majority of foster carers are not paid to do these multifarious ta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1: What do we know about foster carers?
• 2: Towards a theorising of foster care
• 3: Dealing with dilemmas: private and personal
• 4: How foster carers position themselves
• 5: Having a presence through children
• 6: Conclusion
• Appendix A: Pen pictures of the foster carers
• Appendix B: Vignettes
• Notes
• Bibliography