Child abuse and neglect.

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Treatment foster care (TFC) is a normalizing environment in which to treat those children whose particular needs are not addressed in traditional foster care and for whom an institutional setting is a restrictive and unnecessary alternative. However, when the foster care placements of these emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children fail, as they often do, the children are shifted from one home to another without the opportunity to experience permanence or emotional attachment, resulting in poor adjustment to foster care. Placement stability, which depends in part upon effective matching of foster children with potential foster families, is critical for achieving positive outcomes in TFC. Yet, there is a dearth of information to guide placement agencies in making decisions about matching foster children with families. Moreover, once a successful match has been made, it is equally vital that service delivery be of high quality so that permanence is maintained. We review research on the predictors of positive outcomes in foster care, focusing on studies involving emotionally or behaviorally disturbed children, and provide recommendations for selecting foster parents and for ensuring high quality foster care services and placement stability.

Predictors of Placement Outcomes in Treatment Foster Care: Implications for Foster Parent Selection and Service Delivery

The potential to foster successfully starts with developing and supporting competency in 12 domains: providing a safe and secure environment, providing a nurturing environment, promoting educational attainment and success, meeting physical and mental healthcare needs, promoting social and emotional development, supporting diversity and children's cultural needs, supporting permanency planning, managing ambiguity and loss for the foster child and family, growing as a foster parent, managing the demands of fostering on personal and familial well-being, supporting relationships between children and their families, and working as a team member. This article describes each domain and reviews relevant research to help guide the assessment of practicing and future foster parents.

https://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/20170/Buehler-et-al-2006-Competency-domains-for-foster-parents.pdf

The potential for successful family foster care: conceptualizing competency domains for foster parents

Satisfaction with foster parenting: Assessment one year after training

This paper explores the effects of the foster care experience on foster parents’ biological children. In spite of having been accepted for over 40 years as the best form of residential care for mos...

The unknown soldiers of foster care: Foster care as loss for the foster parents’ own children

Although mandated to protect children, most child welfare workers do not receive the training and supervision they need to do their work. Using the case of a 7‐year‐old boy, this paper shows the ne...

R.S.W. Robert C. Twigg

Papers

The unknown soldiers of foster care: Foster care as loss for the foster parents’ own children

Sexual abuse or castration anxiety? The case of Abe