Reviews

Creating New Families: Therapeutic Approaches to Fostering, Adoption and Kinship Care

Jenny Kenrick, Caroline Lindsey and Lorraine Tollemarche (eds)

London: Karnac, 2006

312 pp., £18.99

This timely and comprehensive book addresses the complex needs of children who are fostered, adopted or looked after by kinship carers. Most permanent alternative family placements follow years of very difficult experiences for children in birth families, and the majority of adoptions nowadays are of older children. As society moves through massive turbulence and change, the numbers of Looked After Children continue to rise (an increase of 3% between 2001 and 2005); the numbers of children in family placements are, however, growing more rapidly and a 9% increase is seen in those fostered in that same period, while 38% more children were adopted. All children are growing up in the fluid and often unstable social context of the modern world, many in complex and fragile family structures, thus often the complexity of children's needs is greater.

The children who are at the heart of this book may go through multiple placements and/or wait a long time to be permanently placed. They will bring with them complex conscious memories of earlier families, accompanied by correspondingly complex internal worlds, alongside of and in the light of which, new families must take shape. The book offers a careful, vibrant and accessible account of the intricate processes of making sense of the experiences of children who are unable to remain with their families of origin, and of the profound and often unpredictable endeavour that is the creation of a new family. The book explores and demonstrates the demands as well as the potential with which these new opportunities face each participant child, parent and professional as the task of integrating old and new within child, family and network unfolds.

The title of the book and indeed the name of the specialist, multidisciplinary team which has contributed to it