3 - Where do children go when they can’t stay with their families?

Summary

Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Introduction

The reasons why children enter care vary and are closely connected with the social, economic and political context. For example, when Western societies were dominated by religion, children out of wedlock would be taken into care and often placed with religious families in foster care or adoption. Lemn Sissay's My Name is Why? (Sissay, 2019) and Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Winterson, 2012) are just two of the autobiographies that provide us with insights about care from a lived experience perspective.

Children are no longer taken into care because their mothers are not married. Nowadays, the reasons for going into care are neglect or abuse, although poverty is often an underlying cause in many cases. In countries like Romania, poverty remains the first reason why children will end up in care. The formulation of causes reflects how states respond to the most vulnerable families.

When taking a child into care, the state takes parental responsibility for the child; and even if parents keep parental responsibility, in practice they are no longer involved in their children's lives. Formal as well as informal barriers limit or prevent the time they can spend with their children (Sen and Broadhurst, 2011). Despite evidence that maintaining links with people who were important and safe to them before entering care (Boyle, 2017), more often than not, children are ‘lost in care’ (Millham et al, 1986), become estranged from their families, friends and others in their precare network.

We can reasonably assume that the state undertakes the responsibility to provide for the child and act as a good parent either through foster carers or finding adoptive parents for the child or through services such as residential care. The response of the state to how it treats vulnerable children and their families depends on a country's political, economic and cultural context, with some countries (such as England) giving a strong preference to permanency, regarding adoption as a gold standard, whereas others balance the child's rights and the parents’ human rights or give weight to blood ties using adoption in a much smaller proportion and foster care or residential care for most of the children in their care (Gilbert et al, 2011).