CASE STUDY: GOOD PRACTICE CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

Case Study: Good Practice Children and Families



Case Study: Good Practice Children and Families

Definition & Introduction

The term foster care is often applied to any type of substitute care facility-boarding home, adoptive home, or institution. However, the Child Welfare League of America's (1959) definition is "A child welfare service which provides substitute family care for a planned period for a child when his own family cannot care for him for a temporary or extended period and when adoption is neither desirable nor possible". Note that according to the CWLA, it is care in a family, it is non-institutional substitute care, and it is for a planned period--either temporary or extended. Thus it is unlike adoptive placement, which implies a permanent substitution of one home for another, one family for another. To distinguish this use of the term foster care from other kinds of foster-care arrangements, we will refer to it in this chapter as foster-family care.

Historical Background & Purpose of The Paper

Foster-family care was probably practiced on a limited basis in antiquity: "Under ancient Jewish laws and customs, children lacking parental care became members of the household of other relatives, if such there were, who reared them for adult life" ( Slingerland, 1919, p. 27). The early Church boarded destitute children with "worthy widows."The parents' perception of the primary problem, in the limited number of studies where this is available, tends to differ from that of the worker. Much more frequently, parents see the child's behavior and situational stress as the primary problems requiring placement. Parents see as the major difficulty their own emotional problems, neglect, and abuse much less frequently than the workers ( Phillips, Shyne, Sherman, Haring, 1971, p. 10; Jones, Neuman, Shyne, 1976, p. 32).

Case Study Analysis

The foster mother knows Tom better than the caseworker ever can, but the caseworker knows him and general reactions to foster care situations and can bring to his foster mother a perspective on foster care that is helpful:. . . [The caseworker] knows that fostering is largely a matter of trial and error, and that if a fostering fails it may be because he has not selected the right child or the right foster home, or that the child was not yet ready for a fostering experience, or that the interference of the real parents has made the success of the fostering impossible. But the foster parent does not have this experience of fostering as a guide. The foster parent . . . tends to feel that the success or failure of the fostering rests entirely on what the foster home has to offer to the child. To learn that this is not so will relieve the burden on the foster parents [ Rastell, 1962, p. 116].

Regarding this case, one of the most important contributions that the caseworker makes to the psychic comfort of the foster parents is his assurance that their occasional negative feelings toward Tom is understandable, acceptable, and entirely normal; that an occasional failure ...