Adoption and fostering
Not the placement type in and of itself, but a parent-child relationship that is supported, or not, by the legal process.
Too often, fostering and adoption is seen as an easy route to fixing a damaged child, with insufficient attention paid to the nature of the fostering or adoptive relationship itself. When the carers themselves are seen simply as a role, rather than as people who are both affected by and personally affect the relationship, critical issues get missed, and ultimately the child's experience is not properly understood.
Looking after children who have been endangered, and moving to a family who are not your family of origin, challenges the attachment system of both children and adults in unique ways. Attention needs to be paid to the impact of the child on the foster parents or adopters, as well as to the pattern of relationships of the carers themselves. Assessment tools are needed that shed light on what is going on between the carers and the child.
Grey (2017), Seen and Heard, 27(2), reproduced by kind permission of NAGALRO. Describes and illustrates this approach in more detail.
All children hold a psychological meaning for their parents (Reder and Duncan 1999), and this is no less true for adopted or looked-after children. In adoption this is influenced both by the adoptive parents' prior expectations and motivation, and by their understanding of the child's history and earlier parenting.
Adoption involves taking into your home and heart a child whom carers have often been told comes from bad or dangerous parents. This runs against the grain of the biology of attachment. In many, perhaps most, adoptions this presents no particular problem. But where adoptive parents are struggling, it can colour the meaning they give to those difficulties, and they can feel, as one adoptive parent put it to us, that they are bringing up an alien in their family.
The adoptive relationship is first and foremost an attachment relationship, and like all such relationships involves intense emotions. As Bowlby first drew our attention to, looking after any child is exhausting and emotionally challenging, but manageable because of the joy and pleasure such relationships bring.
If it goes well, there is joy and a sense of security. If it is threatened, there is jealousy, anxiety, and anger. If broken, there is grief and depression.
In relationships that cannot be reciprocal, as in many adoptive relationships where the child is externalising their own trauma and abuse, cannot reward the parent, and in some cases actively rejects them, this threatens the relationship and can break it, with all the feelings Bowlby identifies. In fostering these issues are commonly overlooked, because the foster parent is seen as a carer performing a role rather than a parent in an intense relationship, which is closer to how things actually feel for both child and foster parent.
Traumatised children need to externalise feelings they cannot process for themselves, and so tend to project them onto those caring for them (Fonagy et al. 2004). This can be overwhelming and destabilising for adoptive parents especially, who find themselves treated as if they were the abusing parent, without always being prepared for it. A capacity for mentalisation, seeing the child's experience for what it is and putting it in its fullest context, can be key to managing this without resorting either to blaming and rejecting the child, or to withdrawing from the relationship.
These issues are examined using the Meaning of the Child Interview, which can be given before placement, in relation to the carers' birth children if they have any and to their expectations of the child, or within an established relationship.
The procedure identifies what is going on in the relationship, often allowing past and present experience of suffering to be given a voice and support offered, rather than engaging in any kind of fault-finding exercise. Carers often feel blamed, because professionals, and even the society around them, impose their own expectations of a happy ending. An assessment like the MotC allows issues of this kind to be raised and sympathetically addressed.
The MotC is also a requirement for Level 2 Sensory Attachment Intervention training.
Their skills and experience have helped me make sense of the most complex cases, and have enabled the multiagency service I lead to really help the parents and carers find ways to have an enjoyable and good enough relationship with their children where this previously wasn't possible.Elaine Sullivan, Clinical Lead, Fostering and Adoption Service, Suffolk County Council
