VI. Alternatives to Adoption, Page 4

Pre-Adoption Fostering

This kind of placement is for children who need adoption, but for some reason there is no family available at the moment. Pre-adoption placements can be made immediately after birth and straight from hospital, or children may come into care months or years later. For tiny, healthy babies it may simply be a couple of weeks or months, until the paperwork is sorted out. But if there are suspicions of mental or physical problems, the wait before placement may be significantly longer, until the diagnosis has been made and a special adoptive family is found. If a child has special ethnic or religious needs she may wait in a pre-adoption foster placement while the agency looks for the best possible match. If a child is older, perhaps having been removed from her family for her own safety, she may have a lot of emotional and physical problems that need specialist care, and may go into a specialist or therapeutic placement, which could turn into a pre-adoption or long-term placement. Alternatively, once her progress in the therapeutic placement is satisfactory, she may be moved to a separate foster placement prior to adoption. In pre-adoption fostering there is ordinarily no or only minimal contact with the birth family.

Short-Term Fostering

This kind of care can be for example because the child’s parent has to go into hospital for a few days or weeks and the other parent can’t take time off work to care for the children full-time, or there is no other parent in the home. Maybe both parents have been hospitalised after an accident. Maybe the children have been left home on their own unreasonably and the parents can’t regain custody until they can satisfy the social services and the courts that they are able to care for them properly. There is usually every intention that the children will return home within a week to a few months, and there is often considerable contact with the family, who are emotionally close to the children. This kind of fostering is really a formalised form of “auntie care”, which in former, more socially stable times, would have been done automatically and informally by the extended family. In some cases short-term fostering shades into ...

Rehabilitation Fostering

This kind of fostering is usually for children who have had to be taken from their parents because of neglect or abuse, but it is thought that there is hope that the parents’ behaviour can be changed enough for the children to eventually be returned. While the child is being fostered the parents will be going through re-education and/or therapy, and their behaviour and progress will be closely monitored by the social services and the foster carers. There is usually a lot of contact between parents and child, under supervision, as they learn and practice new parenting skills. This can be in the foster home or in special centres. The parents are definitely on probation, and they know it. If they fail to make enough progress the children can be placed for adoption or long-term fostering. This can lead to conflict between the parents and the foster carers.

This kind of fostering can be very stressful for the carers, especially if the children are returned to what they think are unsatisfactory home situations. It’s even worse if the children come back into care after further neglect or abuse. Some agencies place a great deal of confidence in the judgment of the foster carers about how ready the birth family is to take the child back; others do not, but in any case the foster family has no legal standing. In some cases the birth parents may eventually decide themselves that the children will be better off in permanent new families.

Long-Term or Permanent Fostering

Sometimes a child will come into care on what is expected to be a short-term fostering placement, but the parents and child drift apart, or further events make it impossible for the child to return home. Sometimes a child is placed in foster care almost from birth but legal complications make it impossible for him to be adopted. Sometimes a family decides to long-term foster a child instead of adopting him because they anticipate that they will need a high level of support for many years and want to be sure of access to it. Sometimes an older child will come into permanent care and be adamant that he doesn’t want to be adopted, perhaps out of a feeling of loyalty to his birth family. Any of these reasons can lead to long-term or permanent fostering. That is, the child remains in care until he is a legal adult. Ideally a child will stay in the same placement for the whole time, but unfortunately many children get moved from one placement to another every few years or even months.

A stable long-term foster placement can seem very much like an adoption to the child and foster carers, but there is no real security, and the agency will always be just around the corner to help or interfere, depending on one’s point of view. Many long-term foster carers maintain their relationship with the children they have cared for after they grow up. Although the boarding-out allowance stops at 18 (sometimes replaced by other allowances for people who are unable to live independently), long-term foster parents may have their adult foster children still living at home, just as if they were born-to or adopted, because the parent-child relationship of love and care has become permanent, transcending the legal technicalities. But foster children will not inherit if you die intestate, nor do they classify as your children in your will. If you as a foster parent want your foster children to inherit they must be unambiguously named in your will.

Therapeutic or Specialist Fostering; Retained Foster Carers

Children sometimes come into care who have been severely emotionally damaged by their previous families. There will often be no plan to reunite them with their families. The foster carers may be needed to mount an intensive salvage operation to try to turn these children around. They may have been allowed to become delinquent, self-harming, abusers of other children, animals or adults, using drugs, prostituting themselves, or in deep trouble with the police. There has developed in the last couple of decades a corps of highly-trained specialist foster carers to look after these children medium- or long-term and provide a therapeutic and safe environment for them which may supplement professional therapy. They will be very experienced, often having raised families of their own already. They will have had extensive education in techniques of dealing with very troubled and difficult children.

This is a profession in itself and in many cases it is paid accordingly, with a salary on top of enhanced boarding-out allowances. Both parents in a two-parent home may have given up outside work, with fostering now their full-time job. They may in effect be running a mini children’s home, maybe with outside housekeeping help, but where they are the 24-hour staff who never go off shift, in order to provide the continuity of care that these children need. There is extensive contact with social workers and other professionals. As in long-term fostering, many of these children develop permanent parent-child relationships with their foster carers.

Remand Fostering

This is a special type of fostering, where a child is remanded into the care of foster parents after a court appearance. This might be because he has no functioning family of his own to go to while awaiting trial, or maybe remand to an institution is not appropriate because he needs more therapeutic care. The behaviour of these children can be very difficult (i.e., if they are delinquents), and remand foster parents need a lot of special skills and patience.

Respite Fostering

Respite care is the short-term care of a very dependent or difficult child which enables the usual parents — birth, foster or adoptive — to take a break. Some children’s needs require round-the-clock intensive care and the regular parents can soon become burned out. Respite fostering is often very rewarding, and a close relationship can grow up between the two families over the years. It has been known for respite carers to eventually be asked by the family to adopt their child. Some respite carers will have had special training to care for the needs of very handicapped children. This kind of foster care can be very suitable for people who need to know that a placement will be very short (but repeated at more or less regular intervals), because respite care will almost never be longer than a couple of weeks, and is very often measured in hours or days.

Emergency Fostering

In some cases, for example accidents, domestic violence, arrest of both parents, sudden illness, a child will be left with no family to care for him. Emergency foster families are specialists at taking children at almost no notice. Often the children will be traumatised by the incident which has made them at least temporarily parentless, and will need intensive help.

© Roger Ridley Fenton