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Paper

Foster care and sense of belonging: the voices of the children of the foster families

abstract

Background. In Italy, contrarily to what happens in other countries, home foster carers don't need to be professionally trained. Screening and training take different forms, according to the specific regional social policies, so that in general placements don't have a therapeutic goal. The nature of interventions which could better fit when family foster placements are required prompts queries in researchers as well as psychologists and social workers in regard to the issue of best practices. The question lies on the concern of the complexity and uncertainty of children's family backgrounds. Specific forms of monitoring must be activated when dealing with inter-personal dynamics, which are characterized by continuous re-organizations in each of the individual's and each of the family's behaviours attitudes and representations, where the everyone's role is under a magnifying glass.
Foster care could be seen as a living space where points of view and emotions of different subjects involved can be carefully examined and taken into account. Our goal is to try to gauge approaches which are closer to every subject's needs and resources. The last one is an issue which hasn't been sufficiently explored yet: children's point of view of foster families, (children who have experienced the fact of living, or having lived, together with other maladjusted children).

Method. This contribution is part of a wider research plan aimed at monitoring family foster care interventions carried out during the last 15 years in our region, in order to rethink and improve the actual psycho-social practices. The viewpoints of different subjects who interplay in these psycho-social situations were collected using the focus groups method: foster children's native families, foster families and children, social workers and foster parents'natural children were interviewed. The core issues explored were the same, in order to consider each aspect from different perspectives: the process of becoming a foster family and the quality of family communication, the match between expectations and reality, the quality of changes in family routines, the representations of foster children and of their birth family, and the evaluation of fostering experiences.
Concerning in detail the birth children of foster parents, we could hypothesize that daily interaction with other children who have been deeply wounded and have developed dysfunctional behaviors could progressively change their everyday life, their needs and representations of themselves and others. Some studies have indicated elements of risk, which might arise during adolescence and which enact as a general difficulty to cope with developmental tasks.
The sample is composed by 4 focus groups, each including 9/10 subjects, from 9 to 30 year old.
Each focus group was composed according to the age of their participants and was directed by two psychologists.

Key results. As expected, our findings highlighted main differences in the representa¬tions of the foster-care experience in respect of the subjects'different age.
Pre-adolescents, apart from their evaluations of the outcomes of their own families' fostering experience, found that most of all satisfied the opportunity to meet other peers in a similar life situation. To be mirrored in a reciprocal way by other natural children allowed them to express emotions and feelings which were not yet at a conscious level. With group help, they could reconstruct the gap between their expectations and representations of the child arriving to their home as well as their first meeting with the real child in their mind. If they expected and thought of the child as a playmate, the concrete experience pushed them to cope with feelings related to somewhat diverse, incomprehensible or awkward evoked by the fostered child. This was mainly true in the case of excessively intrusive and impulsive children, unable to respect the boundaries of family rules and sometimes foster parents. They couldn't admit being jealous of the significant amount of time and quality of care attention dedicated by their parents to their foster child; for this reason they distanced and projected this onto their brothers. At the same time, due to their socio-cognitive skills related to age, pre-adolescents appeared to be quite able to identify themselves with some aspects of the child's emotional situation, acknowledging his/her emotional difficulties connected with the fact of being separated from his/her own family and the consequent sense of loneliness. In general, it was clearly possible to find in this group of age, as a main aspect, an oscillatory cognitive as well as emotional evaluation of their experiences of being members of foster families.
Concerning the group of adolescents, the most significant variable was the length of time spent from the beginning to the end of the foster care experience, or the fact that it had already ended, as a different quality of the affective and cognitive processing this experience was implied. The further it was, the more it could be considered as an important and yet metabolized part of their individual and family life, on which they could be now motivated to re-think and to narrate, sharing their own memories with others. When the foster child arrived into the new house, they thought about their very young age as a facilitating factor, which might allow themselves experience this event as a normal one, making the sharing of their room, their toys and their daily rhythms with him/her a normal aspect. To a further consideration, however, as time passed, they all agreed on the fact that the fostering experience had harder and heavvier than predicted. The most recurrent adjective used to describe this was stressing.
Some difficult aspects were particularly highlighted, like the fact they had to share their own caregivers' time and attention with difficult children and to see their own parents become the target of fostered children's aggressive behaviors. Even when foster care had lasted many year, they still maintained a feeling of an unfilled diversity between their own thoughts, desires and behaviors and those of fostered children. However, adolescents showed a well developed capacity to empathically identify themselves with the harsh life conditions of the fostered children, so that they were able to understand not only the difficulty these had in balancing between two quite different families, but moreover the distress for a child when having to admit the reality of his/her parents' inadequacy. From this point of view, adolescents' judgments of the fostered children's native families were severely negative and sometime even derogatory: as if, according to their inner emotional development, the fact of maintaining healthy and positive representa¬¬¬tions of the parental role could represent an unavoidable requirement. Moreover, they emphasized the importance that, from a methodological perspective, during the previous phases of assessment for the foster families, natural children could find more adequate opportunities and attention from professionals, in order be better prepared to cope with the further complexity and to be emotionally supported, when necessary.
Finally, as regards young adults, their representations - as it could be expected - even if were more articulated, were nevertheless emotionally ambivalent and still dense of distress. Their evaluation of the efficacy of the foster practice definitely split between the fostered children, who should have surely taken advantage from having been thrived by an available and caring family, and their own condition as natural children, which has been synthesized as an "highest cost" one. The key-word for defining their own emotional feelings during their childish experience as foster brothers/sisters is responsibility. Their memories of loneliness are mixed with those of the weight related to the large investment of time and resources made by each family member. Even their viewpoint on the possible successful outcomes of temporary family foster placements is still uncertain and contradictory. Someone (in a still angry voice) spoke about the conclusion of family foster care as a decision which did sponge out the positive effects of the efforts made by the foster family, as an illusory retrieval of the well being of the child within his/her native family; some others, however, seemed to be aware of the fact that, progressively, fostered children tended to perceive their membership with their parents, even pathological, more deeply, so that they actively worked in order to re-join them. In this sense, the representations of young adults concerning the long terms effects of the foster care intervention are still an open question. The pivotal point of their evaluation was, in any case, that the delicacy and complexity of these interventions actually need further and more consistent support for each member of foster families, who otherwise might risk encountering relational difficulty and conflicts.
Becoming a foster family can be seen as an intervention which enters couple and family dynamics as a factor of risk which can break the weak webs, or as an opportunity of reinforcing the well-established ones.
To conclude, one of the main results of this study is to indicate the importance of asses¬sing the quality of representations, needs and attitudes of natural children as a key step of foster practices.

Key references
Minty, B. (1999). Annotation: Outcomes in Long-Term Foster Family Care. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 40(7), 991-999.
Ongari, B., & Pompei M.G. (1996). Affidamento familiare: quale modello di genitorialità?. Prospettive Psicoanalitiche nel lavoro istituzionale, 14, 176-192.
Ongari, B., & Pompei M.G. (2006). Aspetti riparativi e di rischio nell'affidamento familiare. Minorigiustizia, 1, 124-132.
Orme, J.C., & Buehler, C. (2001). Foster Family Characteristics and Behavioral and Emotional Problems of Fostered Children: A Narrative Review. Family Relations, 50(1), 3-15.

Contacts: Barbara Ongari, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali Università di Trento, Via S. Giovanni 36, 38100 Trento, E-mail: barbara.ongari@unitn.it, Phone +39 0461 881318.

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