Growing up in Foster Care: One Boy's Struggles

For many children whose parents cannot look after them, foster care offers the only hope for ordinary family life. But there are many barriers in the way of successful family placement, barriers in the foster family, barriers in the child's natural family, and barriers in the child himself. In this paper, I shall focus on one child's difficulties in accommodating to his foster family, as I think his struggles have relevance for our understanding of many children in care.

Many professionals in the field have recognised that understanding and helping children with their feelings is as essential to successful foster home placement as continued support of the foster parents. Dinnage and Kellmer Pringle (1967) state that “the causes of breakdowns (leaving aside for the moment poor selection of, or support for, foster parents) centre around the child's reaction to losing his own family, whether he expresses this by ‘acting out’ or by lack of response”. Flickman (1957) outlines the primary barriers to a child's constructive use of foster family placement, including distrust of people, clinging to old ties, to that which is familiar, and clinging to a hope that his parents will become different. And Thorpe (1980) writes that “time must be devoted to talking with children, both on a factual and emotional level, to help the child to face some of the painful and confusing feelings he is almost bound to have. Failure to help a child to sort out these feelings may result in a child growing up in … ‘an emotional deep freeze!’”

When Mathew began psychoanalytic treatment at age 7½, he faced problems which must be universal to all children in care. He could neither understand nor accept that he would have to spend most of his childhood in foster care. He wanted his own Mother, his own family. And he struggled, against all odds, to maintain a picture of idealised parents who were not to blame for his being in care. It is to the implications of this struggle that I will addr