Therapeutic Stories for Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Families

Addressing the Domino Effect of Issues Facing 10–14-Year-Olds

Joan E. Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000300178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

This accessible resource contains therapeutic stories and guidance for adults who are supporting young people aged 10–14 in foster, adoptive or kinship families. With a solution-focused approach, the stories are designed to address a range of social and emotional problems, covering topics such as bullying, eating disorders, trauma, parents' health, homophobia and racism.

Each story is accompanied by relevant context and theory, discussion points and creative activities that will stimulate the young person's problem-solving skills and imagination, empowering them to explore solutions to situations in their own lives.

Key features include:

• 35 therapeutic stories created to help young people make sense of their experiences, illustrating empathetic responses and solutions to social and emotional difficulties.
• Discussion points and related activities based on the author's extensive practical experience and knowledge.
• Practice guidelines and case studies to illustrate how the story-making approach can be used by therapists, adoptive parents, social workers and teachers.
• Photocopiable and downloadable resources.

This book will enable foster, adoptive and kinship parents, social workers, therapists, teachers and other professionals to support the young people with whom they are working to resolve their dilemmas and enhance their self-esteem.

1Family tensions

New family relationships

Family relationships are the way we first learn about reciprocity and cooperation – they are the “glue” that secures our sense of belonging. It is the quality of these relationships, which determines children’s mental health and happiness. When attachment has been disrupted, children can lose trust in adults’ ability to keep them safe and cared for.

In their family of origin, children will have used survival strategies to get their needs met. These strategies often perpetuate in the new family and may be experienced by foster, kinship and adoptive parents as overly coercive or rejecting and therein discouraging of their efforts. The children’s continued use of the strategies is instinctive. The reason for this is that their neural alarm system has become accustomed to surviving abuse and neglect, which their brains expect to continue. It is why the most traumatised children and young people need professional help to process their earlier experience and reconstruct their behaviour as that of heroic survival.

Children, who have not received the quality of attention they needed from (birth) parents, frequently have fraught relationships with their siblings, each competing to undermine the other’s needs in order to get their own met. It can leave the new parents exhausted as they try to accommodate the needs of all their children. Indeed Selwyn (2019) found that siblings placed together were statistically more likely to disrupt than sequential placements. Only 18 out of the 83 families in her study described normal sibling relationships.

On reaching adolescence young people begin to seek greater independence. At this stage the complexity around contact with birth families and access to social media may further compromise their safety. The child’s first loyalty is so often to the parents they were born to. The child may assume it is impossible to love both sets of parents without showing disloyalty to one or the other. Kim and Tucker (2019) remark that complex dynamics are inherent in navigating these often, ambiguous relationships – not least concerns about safety. In the processes involved in contact with birth family, foster and adoptive families, Fuentes et al. (2018) find key problems are lack of preparation and support.

A recent issue affecting adopted and fostered young people reaching the stage of seeking greater independence, is the lockdown restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. For many, fears about their own and their caregivers’ health and well-being as well as being isolated from their friends and school have only added to their anxiety.

The stories in this chapter illustrate the complex feelings of children caught up in family disruption, including conflict with their care-giving parents, sibling rivalry and co-dependence, problematic contact with their birth family and surviving enforced social isolation. These stories illustrate ways to help children to process their experience and find new ways forward.

Family disruption

In the UK, nearly 50% of families break up and reconstituted families have become commonplace. While many single families and stepfamilies are successful, the course of renegotiating relationships can cause the children to experience anger, resentment and anxiety. The stories in this chapter address anxieties arising from conflict, divided loyalties, sibling rivalry and lockdown in adoptive and foster families consequent to the children’s experience of neglect and disruption in their previous families, including foster placements.

In Story 1, Dora is tired of the bickering between members of her family. On moving to Ma Domino’s, she is helped to think of ways to share resources that will alleviate the pressure and enable her to reconcile to her new situation.

How to use this story

•Read the story and use the discussion points to explore the children’s perceptions of parents and children’s own responsibilities.

•Discuss positive ways to address Dora’s anxieties.

•Encourage practice at dealing maturely with conflict.

•Prepare children to act responsibly when adults are not around.

•Through the creative activities, invite the children to explore the pros and cons of possible resolutions to conflicts and how to negotiate them.

•Help anxious children find activities and outlets that will give them social support and respite from their worries.

Story 1: Dora’s dilemma

Dora’s family had split up and her parents were living with their new partners. Dora, aged 12, and her 10-year-old brother stayed at their Dad’s and the youngest two stayed at Mum’s. Both their stepparents had children living with them. They all bickered as they resented getting less attention from their parents, who seemed to mainly shout at them. For Dora, sharing her life between the two families meant being carted from one place to another and frequently losing her stuff along the way. Living part of the week in each household had got horribly confusing. Dora had to keep trying to remember which day of the week it was and where she was supposed to be. It felt like she didn’t have a proper home any more. Her stepparents no longer seemed to like Dora or her brothers and sister. Dad started drinking and Dora’s brother told his teacher about it. Dora was furious with him when the social workers took them to Ma Domino’s place.

Luckily Ma Domino seemed to understand how difficult things were for Dora, who said, “It’s like being in two half finished jigsaws with pieces missing or not matching!” Nodding sympathetically Ma said, “That reminds me!” She went to the cupboard to fetch boxes of jigsaws she’d collected with the aim of distracting her charges away from their small screens. Ma Domino explained, “These puzzles are all mixed up – will you help me sort them out?” As they made up the jigsaws, Ma Domino encouraged Dora to figure out good things about having a brother and sister and stepsiblings. Dora found it helped to have a grownup listen carefully and show genuine interest in her. It got her thinking about the things they missed. She worked out that some of the skates in Dad’s garage could be swapped for footballs at Mum’s. As she got used to living at Ma Domino’s, Dora grew fonder of her brothers, sister and stepsisters, whom she saw at school. When they had a problem, they came to her to talk it over and together they’d find a solution.

Activities

•Make a jigsaw by drawing and painting a family scene on to card. (Or find a clip art scene, print it and glue it onto card.) Turn the card over and draw jigsaw shapes on the reverse side and cut out these shapes.

•In pairs, think about ways to take turns, share spaces and equipment.

•Discuss sharing systems that work and what happens when they don’t.

•Make a list of games and activities for families to enjoy.

Materials

Stiff card, paper, crayons, pens, scissors, craft knives.

Discussion

•What bothers Dora most about her life? Whom could she talk to?

•In new families it can be difficult to share the space, time and attention. What is it like to share a bedroom with a sibling you’ve only recently met? How can foster and adoptive parents make it easier?

•Is coping with moving, especially into foster care stressful, and as Dora found, does it mean you have even more rules to learn and remember?

•Think of the different sensory experiences. Have you noticed different smells in each house you’ve lived in? Is one house tidier? How do the differences in each place you’ve lived in affect you?

•What do you think the next chapter of the story might be? Will Dora stay with Ma Domino or move home? What might be the outcome?

Reflections

•Going between two households meant that Dora missed the stability of living in one place. She hated losing things and forgetting which house she’d left them in. Dora was also tired of the squabbling going on between her siblings, parents and their partners. Perhaps what Dora most missed was being settled and having fewer worries.

•To support children in this situation, parents could arrange a time to give each child individual attention to show them their feelings matter. Sharing a bedroom, especially with a new sibling, is rarely easy. It takes lots of negotiation to agree what can be shared without ill feeling.

•Each house tends to have its own smell. Cooking smells reflect culture and tradition. Everyone has their own ideas on tidiness and hygiene and everyone thinks they’ve got it right. For children, moving to a new family inevitably presents challenges. Having to get used to all the changes is likely to cause disorientation and confusion.

•Talking over these changes and the effects they are having will help to prevent and ameliorate the build up of distress and anxiety. Some children, who arrive in care, will have been accustomed to far greater freedom than their foster and adoptive parents will feel able to allow, due to having responsibilities for keeping children safe.

•Acknowledging children’s feelings and giving reassurance and clear explanations about the reason for rules, as frequently as necessary, will help children to feel accepted. They may need an identified adult at school whom they can talk to about their feelings.

Divided loyalties

In recent years, unemployment and low pay have been affecting the lifestyle of increasingly more families, reducing income for basic clothes, outings and treats, which they might once have taken for granted. In 2019, the End Child Poverty Coalition[BIB-025] reported that over 54% of children in the UK were living in poverty, a rise testified by the huge spread of food banks and is even more exacerbated by the impact of lockdown and job losses. The stress this causes often leads to depression, and sometimes further disruption and greater financial hardship. For a proportion of families, conflicts lead to the children being t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Dr Clive Holmwood, Assistant Professor, University of Derby
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Family tensions
• 2 Trauma, abuse and neglect
• 3 The legacy of mental illness
• 4 Social, emotional and mental health needs
• 5 Difference and isolation
• 6 Social media pressures
• 7 Practice guidelines and case examples
• Appendices: Worksheets
• Bibliography
• Index