With the growing incidence of parental drug and alcohol use, many children are growing up in homes where they are neglected and are not provided with the learning they need to go on to parent themselves. Even if a child is removed from home and has had the chance to live in a foster home for some years of their lives, if they have experienced poor parenting early on in their lives, they are often ill-equipped to then go on to parent successfully themselves. A "cycle of deprivation" is set up which can lead to young girls who have not experienced a good model of parenting getting pregnant very young and finding themselves unable to manage their babies, simply because they have no ingrained "blue print" which most of us learn through being raised in loving families.
Social workers and the other professions try to recognise problems at an early stage and need to act quickly to identify how young parents can be supported. It is recognised that if a baby is separated from its mother for any length of time, it can have a detrimental effect. Therefore social workers who have concerns about the ability of a mother to meet the needs of her baby will prefer to place them together in a fostercare home to generally assess the situation, manage the risk and teach the mother how to look after the child. The role of the foster carer in such circumstances is to oversee the safety of the baby whilst providing encouragement and advice to the baby's mother, enhancing her ability to parent and building on her relationship with her child.
Foster carers make significant contributions to the assessment of the mother's parenting skills through their observation and recordings. Such a placement is unique and has the dual role of keeping the safety of the child paramount and also supporting the mother. Sometimes the assessing social worker reaches the decision that the baby should be separated permanently and if the court agrees, the carer may be asked to keep the baby until he or she is adopted. On the other hand, the mother and child may move on to their own family home together, often with outreach support offered by various professionals as well as the foster carer.
Jess, a 17 year old woman with learning difficulties and her new born daughter, Marie, were placed with a single female foster carer for a 12 week assessment period. This enabled the mother and daughter to maintain a good bond while being assessed. The real skill for this foster carer was to engage with Jess, advising her and encouraging her without taking over her role as mother, but at the same time ensuring that Marie's needs were being met and that she was safe at all times. The foster carer's ability to balance all these differing needs and to facilitate contact in the fostercare home with Jessvs extended family ensured Marie had a warm, safe start to life with her mother.
