Team Parenting for Children in Foster Care by Jeanette Caw

Author:Jeanette Caw [Jeanette Caw with Judy Sebba]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857008206
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2013-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

BEING A THERAPEUTIC FOSTER CARER

New foster carers invariably report that despite the training and assessment process they participated in, they were unprepared for the nature of difficulties they experienced in their first placement. When applying to be a foster carer, the desire to pass the assessment period and the motivation to care for young people work to ensure that a comprehensive knowledge of the challenges they may face in their career is only dimly grasped. Where Team Parenting is well established, foster carers are recruited with an expectation that they will engage with therapeutic fostering. However, the exact nature of what this means can only ever be known via lived experience. Being a therapeutic foster carer means engaging in reflective practice that requires a process of thinking about not only the young person’s mind and experiences but one’s own. This can be bewildering for foster carers who may not have knowingly signed up for exploration of their own mental and emotional processes when applying to foster. Yet this is what therapeutic parenting requires – the ability to mentalise and be aware, continually and persistently, of what is happening internally for oneself as well as imagining what is happening for the young person.

This level of self-awareness requires a degree of openness and trust. Often, when placements are bemired in struggles, foster carers can feel rejected, hurt and that they are failing in some way. Defending against such painful experiences can lead them into positions of blame. They may feel that if only the young person would behave differently, and if they had the necessary support, then they would be able to succeed with this placement. Working with a therapist involves confronting what lies hidden beneath the blame. Dismantling defences entails divesting oneself of self-righteousness and sitting with uncomfortable feelings. When foster carers can do this, they are likely to be able to respond sensitively and openly to the young person’s pain in placement. However, the ability to do this requires that they have engaged in a self-reflective journey, if not a therapeutic one, for themselves (Hughes 1997; Siegel and Hartzell 2004).

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