Gaining Satisfaction? An Exploration of Foster-Carers' Attitudes to Payment

The payment of foster-carers has long been controversial, reflectingboth philosophical debates as to whether fostering should bea voluntaristic or professional activity and concerns aboutplacement provision and service delivery for children. Althoughmany research studies have touched upon the question of foster-carers’satisfaction with payments, this has not been explored in anydepth. Drawing on findings from a study involving 1,181 foster-carersin twenty-one agencies, this article attempts to provide suchan analysis with four main objectives. These comprised: examiningassociations between attitudes towards payment and demographic,socio-economic and fostering career variables; comparing responsesbetween carers based in local authorities (grouped accordingto levels of payment and performance criteria) and independentagencies (IFAs); gauging the influence of carers’ ‘orientations’towards foster-care as a ‘professional’ task; andanalysing payments in terms of their different components, suchas fees, maintenance and certain designated expenses. Amongmany detailed findings to emerge were the generally low levelof satisfaction among local authority carers, especially incomparison with their IFA counterparts and the growing supportamong carers for salaried status. There was mixed evidence onlinks between attitudes towards remuneration and the performanceof agencies.     

Disabled Children's Experience of Permanency in the Looked After System

Research with seven local authorities in England provided dataon the ‘care careers’ of 596 foster-children overthree years (Sinclair et al., 2005). One part of this studylooked at the experiences of disabled foster-children comparedto non-disabled foster-children. The research aimed to identifyif there were any particular difficulties in pursuing permanencyfor disabled looked after children. This article introducesa concept developed by the author from this work: the idea thatdisabled children may be at risk of experiencing a ‘reverseladder of permanency’; being less likely than their peersto receive permanent placements such as adoption and returnhome. The results of the study partially supported this hypothesis,reinforcing existing findings and highlighting some new ones.Foster-children with learning but not other impairments wereless likely to be adopted. All disabled children were less likelyto return home and therefore remained in foster-care for longer.Disabled children who were adopted, or who returned home, didso after a greater delay compared to non-disabled children.By contrast, children who were ‘clearly disabled’achieved a greater degree of permanence within the care system.The article concludes by considering the implications of suchfindings for policy and practice.     

Recent Changes in Adoption and Fostering in Spain

As in many other countries, adoption and foster-care have seenimportant changes in Spain. Adoption of healthy Spanish babieshas now become the exception, while special needs and inter-countryadoptions have become much more common. Foster-care, in itsturn, has also changed, and now there are new types of fosteringarrangements and new professional practices substituting oldones. This article presents a summary of the main changes thatoccurred in recent years in the context of adoption and foster-carein Spain.     

Fostering Children and Young People on Remand: Care or Control?

Remand foster-carers can provide placements for children andyoung people awaiting trial or sentence within criminal courts.The role of fostering children and young people on remand isin some ways more complex than fostering other children, asremand foster-carers have to bridge the divide between providingthe care of the welfare system and the control of the criminaljustice system. This paper considers the ways in which a smallsample of remand foster-carers attempted to manage these tensionsand incongruities and tried to reach a balance between careand control. The paper identifies two main ‘parenting’approaches adopted by remand foster-carers, and comments onthe appropriateness of each to meet the needs of children andyoung people on remand, whilst still achieving the requirementsof the criminal justice system.     

Genealogy's Desire: Practices of Kinship Amongst Lesbian and Gay Foster-Carers and Adopters

This article considers the practices of kinship amongst lesbianand gay foster-carers and adopters, and asks how far these havechallenged dominant genealogical discourses. It asks not howexisting social work practice can be adjusted to prevent discriminationon the basis of sexuality, but rather how the practices of lesbianand gay carers can be drawn upon to expand the genealogicalvisions of state foster-care and adoption work. The author discussesthe methods by which lesbian and gay carers have challengedheteronormative views of adult relationships, the idea of ‘natural’parenting, conventional state child welfare models, the biogeneticbasis of adult–child bonds, notions of the proper ‘family’,and the supposedly non-political nature of heterosexual kinship.Finally, the article asks how foster-care and adoption practicemight learn from the new forms of intimacy, care and parentingdeveloped by lesbians and gay men.     

Mental health service utilization in children adopted from US foster care,US private agencies and foreign countries: Data from the 2007 National Survey of Adoption Parents (NSAP)

Aims

In this analysis, we (1) described the rate of mental health service utilization for children from domestic foster care adoption, domestic private adoption, and international adoption and (2) analyzed the effect of common risk factors on mental health service utilization.

Data

As part of the 2007 National Survey on Adoptive Parents (NSAP), parents with children 5–17 years old (N = 1722) were asked if their children had received mental health services and how helpful these services were. Parents also provided data on the children's demographics and likelihood of pre-adoption adversity (e.g., abuse).

Results

For boys, mental health services were utilized by 52.4% of domestic foster care adoptees, 41.0% domestic private adoptees, and 40.0% of international adoptees. For girls, the corresponding rates were 36.3%, 24.8%, and 30.9% respectively. Parents reported that the services were very helpful for about half of the children. Logistic regression analyses showed that adoptees from domestic foster care were more likely than international adoptees to have received mental health services, but there was no difference between domestic private adoptees and international adoptees. Older age at placement, older age at assessment, having special health care needs, and being male all increased the odds for having received mental health services.     

Risk and Resilience in Long-Term Foster-Care

The concept of resilience provides a necessary framework forunderstanding the varied ways in which some children do wellin the face of adversity. The debate on resilience in childrenhas shifted from an emphasis on factors to an emphasis on processesand mechanisms and from identifying resilience to promotingresilience. Children in long-term foster-care have experienceda range of early adversities which continue to affect theirself-esteem, self-efficacy and capacity to cope with developmentalchallenges. Risk and protective characteristics in the foster-child,the foster-carers, the birth family and the agencies involvedwith the child will interact in complex ways to produce upwardor downward spirals. This article reports on a longitudinalstudy of children in long-term foster-care, funded by the NuffieldFoundation. It provides a psychosocial model that links innerand outer worlds, developmental theory and social work practice,to explore why some children appear to be making good progresswhile others continue to experience multiple developmental difficulties.     

The Regulation of Out-of-Home Care

The regulation of out-of-home care in Australia has become increasinglyformalized and detailed, partly driven by a recent wave of auditsof abuse in foster-care. The emergence and possible consequencesof this increased regulation are examined, with a particularfocus on relative care. A pluralist–democratic approachto accountability would involve a regulatory regime linked toother quality strategies, with the emphasis on improved qualityand outcomes rather than compliance with policy and procedures.The concentration on expanding the regulatory regime is contrastedwith more limited efforts to improve carer support—anessential ingredient of an effective foster-care system.