Family Process: 'Providing therapy to children and families in foster care: a systemic-relational approach'.

50:4, December 2011, pp 436-52

Foster care is a system created to protect children from an unsafe home environment yet multiple placements, conflictual relationships between foster parents and birth parents, drawn-out court battles and living in an ongoing state of not knowing when or if they will be going home are just some of the challenges many children in care are expected to manage. Children and families involved in foster care need family therapists who are willing to engage birth parents, foster parents and service providers in conversations about the children, with the goal of minimising post-placement trauma, repairing and strengthening family connections and moving children out of foster care and into permanent homes as quickly as possible. This article aims to provide a guide for therapists working with families involved in foster care. It describes a therapeutic approach to providing family therapy that integrates ideas from postmodern therapies and structural family therapy. Suggestions through case examples are provided about who needs to talk to whom about what, when to have these necessary conversations and how to talk to people in a way that mobilises adults to take action for the children.