Archive Material relating to Fostering.

Looking After Yourself, Helping Each Other – How can yoga support foster carers?

NAFP/ISP Project Evaluation Looking After Yourself – the new pilot “NAFP began a project in January 2014 which aimed to pilot an innovative approach to promoting carers’ wellbeing. ISP, an independent sector fostering provider, has always taken a therapeutic approach to foster care and given high priority to foster carer support. Their centre in Teynham, […]

Attachment makes the child grow stronger

Many children in care suffer from severe problems of attachment. Suzanne Hewson, a foster carer [with ISP], explains the implications for fostering in everyday family life.

A Question of Balance

Published in “A Question of Technique. Independent Psychoanalytic Approaches with Children and Adolescents”. Edited by Monica Lanyado and Ann Horne (Routledge 2006)

What it feels like to be a Foster Carer

By Petrina Brown | Published in The Sunday Times – Style Supplement, 9th December 2012. In this short article, published in December 2012, Petrina Brown reflects on what it feels like to be a Foster Carer. Open What it feels like to be a Foster Carer. The PDF will open in a new browser tab […]

Meeting of Minds: Using the Tavistock model of Child Observation

By Dr Leslie Ironside | Published in Adoption & Fostering, Volume 36, Number 2, 2012. From the Introduction… The task for foster carers is complex and emotionally demanding on many levels. A crucial aspect of maintaining a successful placement is that carers have developed the metacognitive skills for thinking about the foster child’s mind, to […]

An Attachment-based Treatment of Maltreated Children and Young People

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 as a Support for Foster Carers and Adoptive Parents

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.

Holding the looked after child through reflecting dialogue

By John Hills | Published in Context 78 April 2005, pp. 18 – 23. Alfred Adler, What Life Should Mean to You, 1931. ‘Psychotherapy is an exercise in co-operation and a test of co-operation.  We can succeed only if we are genuinely interested in the other.  We must be able to see with his eyes […]

Extracts III: Nancy Hazel

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.

Extracts II: Nancy Hazel

This is the second paper by Nancy Hazel from the booklet “Free to be Myself: the development of teenage fostering” edited by Nancy Hazel and Andrew Fenyo.

Extracts I: Nancy Hazel

Nancy Hazel was a pioneering figure in the development of professional fostering in the 1970s and 80s in the UK. She wrote three papers in a booklet, “Free to be Myself: the development of teenage fostering” edited by Nancy Hazel and Andrew Fenyo (1993). This entry contains the first of the three.

Fostering Breakdown

Ron Dare was a Consultant Educational Psychologist to the Cotswold Community in the 1970s and 1980s and he was a member of the Community’s Managing Body, a sub-committee of Wiltshire County Council’s Social Services Committee. After retiring as a Senior Educational Psychologist for Wiltshire’s Education Department, in addition to his consultancy work at the Cotswold Community, he became involved in training foster carers and this article arose from that work.