Birth to Six Initiative
Topic Three: Young Children in Foster Care
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Learning Objectives
• Learn how foster care is different for young children
• Understand the role of the foster parent in the
young child’s life
• Understand how visitation with young children and
birth parents should occur
• Be able to create a visitation plan that meets the
needs of young children
• Value the need for a foster care system tailored for
young children
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What is foster care?
• It is an intervention designed to protect and
remediate children who have been
maltreated.
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Promote Infant Well Being
• Physical Safety – child proofed homes
• Provide developmentally appropriate levels
of stimuli
• Develop positive, nurturing relationships
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Foster Care for Young Children:
Premise #1
•Foster parent must become the
primary caregiver and the primary
attachment figure for the child.
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Premise #2
•Safety, stability and emotional
availability of the giving adult are
paramount.
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Premise #3
•Foster parents must psychologically
invest in the child in order to
become the attachment figure.
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Premise #4
•Adults, but not young children, are
capable of sustaining attachment
relationships across time and space.
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Question:
•Based on these four premises, how
is foster care different for young
children?
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Foster care is different for young children
• Cannot sustain attachment relationships over
time and space
• Require substantial and regular physical
emotional availability
• No ability to appreciate the big picture of the
child welfare system
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How can foster parents help?
• Be sensitive and responsive
• Know and value the child as an individual
• Place the needs of the child ahead of their
own needs
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Inherent Contradictions of Foster Parenting
• Psychological Ownership
– Love the child as their own
– Advocate for the child
– Become the child’s “go to” person in times of uncertainty
• Uncertainty
– Child can be removed at any time
– Progress of biological parents
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• Isolation/lack of support
• Repeated attachments and separation from
children in their care
• Insufficient or inadequate training
• Caring for children who have experienced
attachment difficulties
• Behavioral or emotional difficulties
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Institutional care for young children?
• Children raised in institutions are at
dramatically increased risk of
–
–
–
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Disturbances of social relatedness and attachment
Externalizing behavioral problems
Inattention/hyperactivity
Developmental problems
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Loss for Young Children
•What do young children lose when
they enter foster care?
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Loss and Separation
•Removal from birth family
•Multiple placements
•Ambiguous loss
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Ambiguous Loss
“with ambiguous loss, there is no closure; the
challenge is to learn how to live with the
ambiguity.” Pauline Boss, Ph.D.
Ambiguous loss is a relationship disorder and
not individual pathology.
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Two types of Ambiguous loss situations
• Type One: Occurs when there is physical absence
and psychological presence.
– Loss of parent due to divorce or giving up a child for
adoption
• Type Two: Occurs when there is physical presence
but psychological loss
– Person you care about is psychologically absent such as
autism, depression, traumatic brain injury, dementia
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How can the foster care system be different?
Two Examples
• Attachment and Bio behavioral Catch Up (ABC
Intervention)
– 10 session, manualized intervention delivered by trained
clinicians in the home of the foster parent and young
child together
• Multi Disciplinary Treatment Foster Care (MTFC)
• Intense training to foster parents, 24 hour on call staff, daily
progress reports
• Therapeutic play group, skills training, preschool, family therapy
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Small Group Activity
• Design a foster care system for young
children in your county.
• What would it look like?
• What interventions would be in place?
• What outcomes would you hope to see?
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Facilitating Positive Transitions
• Movement of infants should be prevented if possible.
• Focus on the infant’s individual developmental needs
• Timing is important
– Before age 6 months, may be less traumatic than between 6-24
months when attachment is occurring.
• Select a caregiver who is willing and able to care for the
needs of an infant, i.e. crying, exploration when mobile,
“terrible two’s”, etc.
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Sensitive Transitions
• Retain some semblance of continuity
– Caregivers should share information about an
infant’s needs and preferences
– Caregivers should maintain an emotional
connection based on their mutual desire for the
infant’s well being
– Maintain relationship with previous caregivers
– Maintain child care settings whenever possible.
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Retain some semblance of continuity
(continued)
• Maintain infant routines, including food,
formula, sleep schedules
• Maintain continuity in diapering, i.e. are they
sensitive to temperature when being
changed?
• Use transitional objects, i.e. special toys,
stuffed animals, blankets, music
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Visitation
• Effective visitation creates and optimal opportunity
for children and parents to experience being
together again.
• A high quality visit has a therapeutic goal,
incorporates well planned activities to support that
goal and is conducted in a developmentally
appropriate, interactive manner.
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Visitation
• Why is it important?
• Who has the right to visit?
• What should happen during visits?
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The Role of Visitation
• Is it harmful?
– Stress vs. harm
– Includes harm to child’s attachment to foster parent
• Is it helpful to the child’s attachment to the
biological parent?
– What is the goal?
• Is it helpful to the biological parents’ attachment to
the child?
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Principles of Visitation
• Child’s well being is the primary concern
– Must have an attachment figure present if visit
more than 6 months old
– Better to have an attachment figure present even
if less than 6 months old
– Child can sustain a relationship with parent
without the parent being an attachment figure
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• As parents progress towards reunification,
frequency and length of visits should
increase
• Relationships with foster parents should
continue after reunification whenever
possible
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Things to Remember
• Visitation is a child’s right, not a parent’s privilege.
• Visitation should never be used as a reward or
punishment.
• Visitation should be planned and purposeful.
• Visitation activities should match the child’s
developmental level.
• Visitation should occur in as natural a setting as
possible.
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Considerations of collaborative visitation
• Visiting without attachment figure (foster
parent) causes undue stress on child by
second half of first year
• Presence of the foster parent can improve
quality of visit for biological parent
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Promising Practices
• Ice Breaker Meetings
– Provide a structured, first informal meeting early
in placement for both foster and birth families to
create an atmosphere of “working together”.
– This first meeting or “ice breaker” is a facilitated,
child focused meeting held shortly after a child is
placed (or replaced) in out-of-home care and
lasting not more than thirty minutes.
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Promising Practice: Visit Coaching
• Visit coaching and support directly address the
issues that brought the child into care, building on
family strengths and guiding improved parenting.
• Visit coaching begins with an agreement with the
family that identifies the child-specific needs to be
addressed and an understanding of how those
needs relate to the risks that brought the child into
care.
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Visit Coaching (continued)
• Before each visit, families work with the visit coach
to address fears, barriers, and parenting issues.
• During the visit, the coach actively acknowledges
the family’s strengths in responding to their
child(ren) and guides them in improving their
skills.
• After the visit, the family and coach evaluate how
the next visit could be improved.
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Small Group Activity
• Develop a visitation plan for a child and
mother. The mother is making good
progress on her case plan and the plan is for
reunification in 3 months. Currently visits
occur one time a week for one hour.
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Returning Home
• Parents should develop a psychologically and physically
safe home
• The house should safety proofed
• Place “transitional” objects in view of infants to create a
“safe” environment
• Sing a familiar song, read a familiar book, place former
caregiver pictures around the home
• Maintain current schedule
• Refrain from “overnights” away from the home until
adjusted
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Looking at your County system
•What is working well for young
children?
•What needs improvement?
•Prioritize improvements
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Discussion
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Post-Test
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Wrap Up & Next Steps
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