Category — Material relating to Fostering

Repetitive, intrafamilial, abuse and neglect leads to a complex array of deficiencies and symptoms that reflect both the traumatic effects of maltreatment on children as well as the effects of their failing to develop a coherent pattern of attachment behaviors toward their caregivers. This article will attempt to describe principles of a psychological treatment for maltreated children and young people who have been placed in foster care and adoptive homes. This treatment, based on attachment theory, provides dyadic interventions that aim to be transforming and integrative. The co-regulation of affect and the co-construction of meaning are central to the treatment process, just as they are central features in attachment security.

Attachment Theory is one among many theories that try to explain the progress of a child from pre-birth to adulthood. In these notes I am privileging Attachment Theory as important in helping us to understand the children who grow up in foster care or within adoptive homes. Attachment Theory is concerned with the early years of life, the time of life that is most troubling for fostered and adopted children. The impact of this early experience on later social and emotional development, and subsequently on cognitive development, is explained within the context of these early relationships.

By Dr Leslie Ironside.

By John Hills.

This is the third and last paper written by Nancy Hazel from the booklet, Free to be Myself: the development of teenage fostering” edited by Nancy Hazel and Andrew Fenyo. In this paper she specifically refers to the way ISP started.