Fostering a Child's Recovery

Family Placement for Traumatized Children

Mike Thomas, Terry Philpot

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781843103271
• eBook ISBN: 9781846426872
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The overwhelming majority of children and young people in care today are fostered, but for some this only increases their problems through untreated trauma, ill-judged placements, poorly supported foster carers
and multiple moves.

This practical and evidence-based book outlines the principles of family placement on the basis of planning and evidence, and explores the qualities, skills and insights that create positive placement outcomes. Fostering a Child's Recovery shows how the key to good fostering is well-trained and skilled foster carers who form part of a team of professionals who surround the child.

This book will benefit all professionals and parents involved in providing recovery for traumatized children and young people in ensuring successful placements.

CHAPTER 1

The Context of Family Placement

From myth to modern times: A short history of fostering

The origins of fostering are confused and obscured by the mists of history. Until adoption was legally sanctioned in the UK – in England and Wales in 1926 and in Scotland in 1930 – it was not always easy to discern the different ways in which children who were separated from their families were looked after by others. Certainly, informal adoption – that is, children being taken permanently into the care of a family not headed by its birth parents and treated as a child of that family – has always existed and most societies have devised some kind of arrangement, often with other family members, for children separated from their birth parents.

As in other areas of history that of fostering shows that history is not something that is fixed but rather that it is cyclical – that trends and practices recur or are ‘re-invented’ under new names, often with only slightly different emphases. We now define fostering as a formal arrangement, by local authorities, to place children in substitute family care but without devolving all the legal rights and responsibilities and decision-making that adoptive parents enjoy. However, the past lack of a legal distinction between adoption and fostering and the cultural undertones of how ‘family’ and its responsibility for children within the extended grouping have been defined in the past makes it difficult to distinguish different kinds of care. But, certainly, children being cared for by other than their birth parents in a family context (as opposed to institutional care) is something attested to by myth and ancient history. For example, the stories of Moses, found abandoned in the bulrushes, and Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf after being removed from their mother, continue to have a strong cultural resonance. Literature, too, has made use of the orphan, often with dark effect. Novels dealing with this issue range from adult to children’s fiction – from Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to Philip Pullman’s Ruby in the Smoke; The Secret Garden to The Cement Garden and characters from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, Anne of Green Gables to Jane Eyre. These, together with myth have helped to create a powerful cultural memory that shapes and continues to influence how we think of children who are separated from their birth families.

Before comparatively modern times, there was room for doubt about exactly how to define the living circumstances of such children. For example, Morgan (1998) approvingly quotes Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers (1991) when he writes of the care of the ancient world’s abandoned children. There was no state intervention to assist them and they might die but they might also be taken in. Boswell says that many households had children ‘collected from other families, who may have been permanent or temporary residents [our italics], free or servile, legally adopted or simply supported’. So while Boswell tells us that there was a form of legal adoption and that children could be ‘temporary or permanent residents’, we could assume this is what we now think of as fostering, even if Moses’ and Oedipus’ case notes are not available for inspection! Indeed, the mixing of informal adoption and fostering in the distant past has its modern equivalent whereby the definitional differences between long-term fostering and adoption are not always easy to sustain, other than in a legal sense.

Fostering could be found in Ireland in medieval times and, in the absence of any legal basis for fostering, all ‘fostering’ that occurred then can be taken as having been private fostering.¹ There are even references to private fostering much earlier than the celebrated and notorious case of Mrs Waters and her ‘baby farm’ in 1870. (She was tried and executed for the murder of several foster children.) It was as a result of this case, as Holman (1973) has shown, that, in 1872, the Protection of Infant Life Act came onto the statute books – the first recognition by the state of its duty in this area.

Before then records show young orphans being placed with nurses in the London suburbs at a time when institutional care was the norm. These children were very probably in monastic or private institutions, as the workhouse – a state institution – did not come into being until the Poor Law Act 1601. Wet nurses, who originated in France around 1450, can be seen as foster carers in an important contemporary sense (Triseliotis, Sellick and Short 1995b). They were paid for by the state and expected to keep the children up to the age of 12. Many children, it is believed, were absorbed within the nurses’ own families as a form of de facto adoption. The wet-nurse system was adopted in England and Scotland by the foundling hospitals in London and Glasgow but, unlike in France, the children went back to their families or institutions when they were five or six. Later the children would be put out as apprentices.

The first instance of recognizably professional fostering in modern times is probably that instituted by the Foundling Hospital (later the Thomas Coram Foundation and now Coram Family) in London. It is the country’s oldest children’s charity, created in 1739 and opened in 1741. From the very beginning babies were boarded out – that is, fostered – in their first five years with wet nurses. They were then brought back to live at the hospital. Medicine had, by then, recognized that babies should be breastfed rather than have a diet of dried crusts and chicken. The hospital’s wet nurses were subject to initial selection procedures, given advice on child care and inspected by either the matron or the steward of the hospital, and there were later local inspections. In 1853 Dickens visited the hospital and recorded that the wet nurses were paid six pence (2½ p) a day and 14 shillings (70p) a year for babies, and 18 shillings (90p) for four- and five-year-olds (Pugh 2007). It is safe to assume that payment of fees and allowances had been made to wet nurses before this time.

In 1818 the policy of calling the children back to their families of origin was abandoned in Glasgow when it was decided to encourage the children to be brought up by families with whom they were originally placed until they found their way in life. This is the system which, in the UK, collapsed in the wake of the baby farming scandals and the consequent legislation mentioned above. Ruegger and Rayfield (1999) date modern fostering – that is, payment to the carer with statutory oversight – to the Reverend Armistead in 1853 in Cheshire, who placed children from a workhouse with foster parents. The local authority was legally responsible for them and paid the foster parents an allowance equivalent to the cost of maintaining them in the workhouse. A few years later, the authors go on to say, a Mrs Hannah Archer in Swindon placed a number of orphaned girls with foster carers. They were paid the basic workhouse allowance and a supplement of voluntary contributions.

Although there was initial opposition to fostering – it was believed it would encourage feckless and irresponsible parents on the one hand or money-grasping exploitive carers on the other – its practice grew. To some extent, at least with regard to ambivalence about people being paid to look after other people’s children, this is echoed in the modern popular misunderstandings about the professionalization of fostering. But the belief that children ought to have some kind of substitute family care was encouraged by pioneering philanthropists like Thomas Barnardo and Thomas Bowman Stephenson, founder of the National Children’s Home & Orphanage (now Action for Children), with their reaction against children being cared for in large institutions. In the 1860s the National Committee for the Boarding Out of Pauper Children was concerned not only with the damaging effects of institutional care but also saw boarding out as a means by which girls – the committee consisted of women – could be trained and thus would be created a larger supply of labour, particularly for domestic service (Philpot 1994).²

A third of all Barnardos’ children were in foster care by 1891 (Parker 1990) and while the National Children’s Home did not mention boarding out in its annual reports until 1908 it said this had been going on since the 1880s. By 1909 a quarter of the Home’s children were cared for in this way (Philpot 1994). But those responsible for running the workhouses were also charged with boarding out some of the children living there. There were 98 such officials in 1908, only six of whom had specific responsibility for placements, and until 1911 only abandoned or orphaned children aged between 2 and 10 could be boarded out. (Today local authority practice guidance tends to suggest that no child under 12 should be in residential care.) It was only gradually over the past 25 to 30 years that children and young people with a learning difficulty, those who were physically disabled, those in trouble with the law, and those with difficult personalities came to be seen as being able to be fostered.

Barnardo and Stephenson, with some others, also engaged in an experiment in mass fostering. Children had first been migrated to Canada by philanthropists Maria Rye in 1868 and Annie MacPherson in 1869. Stephenson brought the big battalions of the children’s charities to the endeavour when the National Children’s Home first sent children to Canada in 1873 and Barnardo followed in 1882. There were varying motives for this new direction. It was partly to replenish the white Protestant stock of the colonies but there was also a belief that the cities were places of vice and temptation and that taking children away from this was to make a surgical cut in their existences, create a new life and a new start. The new land had, believed Stephenson, ‘a moral tone’, the strong influence of religion and plentiful work. The concept of ‘rescue’, embodied in the names of children’s societies, especially Catholic ones, was a strong one, underwritten by the moral concept. Indeed, ‘moral’ was a term often found at this time – as in children being in ‘moral danger’ – as well as much later when moral welfare associations flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, the Association of Moral Welfare Workers was only wound up in 1975 (Wagner 1982).

Particularly in the idea of rescue, there are echoes of the anti-urbanism of William Morris and the work of the garden city pioneers (Philpot 1994). Urban living was seen as being unhealthy and dangerous, hence the retreat to the country and new forms of idealized living. For the child-care pioneers, urban living meant exposing the children to all kinds of temptation and depravity, hence their export to the healthy, open spaces of the colonies. These children were often boarded as hands with far-flung farming families, who would have taken them in as some approximation of a family member rather than merely another worker. The National Children’s Home, in particular, did inspect the placements and attempt to monitor them, although given distances and communications, this was probably more easily intended than done. Other charities followed – Fairbridge Farm Schools and some of the Catholic charities among them – and children began to be sent to New Zealand and Australia. The National Children’s Home were still sending children to Canada in the 1950s, while Barnardo’s persisted until the 1960s (Wagner 1982).

The mass evacuation during World War II when children were taken away from the cities, which were the targets of bombing raids, to live with families in the country was another example of fostering on a mass scale (or ‘boarding out’ as it was still called and would be for some time to come). This policy was to have far-reaching personal and political consequences (see especially Holman 1995). The personal consequences were felt by the children, some of whom had suffered greatly, physically and emotionally, at being separated from their parents. But the death of one child, Denis O’Neill, in January 1945, who had been boarded out by his local authority, gave particular impetus to public concern. O’Neill’s death was a precursor of the child abuse cases that came to public attention in the 1970s and continue to the present day. It was not until the death of Maria Colwell, at the hands of her stepfather in 1974, that public, media and political attention would again be unremittingly directed on children who die at the hands of parents, step-parents and, occasionally, other relatives but the O’Neill case was notable in that the perpetrator was a foster carer and significant in that it led to radical reforms.

The government had already announced at the end of 1944 that it would set up a committee to consider ‘the existing methods of providing for children deprived of a normal home life’. (This was the wording of the terms of reference for the Curtis Committee.) This had come as a result of agitation by Lady Allen of Hurtwood and grew also from what evacuation was revealing to the receiving families about the kind of public (which also meant charitable) care from which many of the children came. O’Neill’s savage death – he was beaten and starved – prompted the setting up of the Curtis Committee in 1946. The Committee recommended the creation of children’s departments, which were then created by the Children Act 1948. But often forgotten is the report’s stipulation that all children in care should be fostered unless this was ‘not practicable or desirable for the time being’. The Act also formalized the assessment and selection of foster parents, guidelines for which had, in fact, existed under the Poor Law. But change after that was slow: indeed, until fairly recently the Boarding-Out Regulations of 1955 still governed much of fostering. The regulations were updated in 1988 and absorbed, with minor alteration, in the Children Act 1989, and we now have the Fostering Services Regulations 2002.

With Curtis’ recommendations and philosophy accepted, two factors now came into play. First, Curtis had given a great boost to boarding out but, second, a growing general distrust of residential provision for children began to develop, from which the sector has never really recovered. This has contributed to the later radical turning away from residential care. These two matters were to affect markedly the pattern of children’s services and to lead eventually, among other things, to the realization that children with certain disabilities and other characteristics thought to weigh against them, could be either fostered or adopted.

The 1960s might be judged the liberal hour when it came to the care of chi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Other Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• A Note and Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Context of Family Placement
• 2. Children and Their Histories
• 3. The Carers
• 4. Fostering, Loss and Opportunity
• 5. Practising to Make Perfect: Introductions and the Practice Family
• 6. How Placements Can Succeed
• 7. Toward Independence
• Notes
• References
• The Story of SACCS
• The Authors
• Subject Index
• Author Index