engleski

„In and out of foster care"- Perspective of children placed in children's home following inadequate foster care

Majority of data concerning foster care system in Croatia is generated by the professionals and adults. There is lack of information on how children feel about foster care and other forms of public child care, as well as how they experience foster care and what they take away from it. Respecting the fact that children’s perspective is imperative in all matters concerning the child, research study was developed in order to enable “voices of children” in foster care to be heard. The purpose of this research is directly related to developing new knowledge needed to improve the quality of foster care. General research objective was to examine and understand foster care from the perspective of foster children and biological children of foster parents, as well as adults with experience of living in foster care as children, i.e. exploring and understanding the user perspective. The research was based on direct data collection from research participant through semi-structure interviews. Interview transcripts, read and approved by research participants, represent data processed according to thematic analysis method. This paper will focus specifically on the perspective of children who experienced inadequate or unsuccessful foster care placement. This subsample consists of 10 children, seven males and three females, who have been placed in children’s home following inadequate foster care. Their age ranges from 10 to 17 years. The main finding is that this group of children has few uniform perspectives on the foster care system. Results implicate that biological and foster families share some negative characteristics (bad relationships, violence, abuse), but also that the foster family has a significant positive meaning for some of the children. The experiences of children with multiple removals and transfers from a familiar environment confirmed that every removal of the child from the familiar environment is difficult to accept and/or traumatic for the child. The only exception to this rule in the children’s experiences is removal from the foster family for the reason of meeting new needs and achieving a new quality of life.

children's perspective; foster care; inadequate placement

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