Residential Child Care and the

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• Residential Child Care and the
• Family Metaphor
• Relations, Relationships and Relatedness
• Andrew Kendrick

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• it is essential that we provide the necessary
  warmth, affection and comfort for children's
  healthy development if we are not further to
  damage emotionally children and young people who
  have usually had a raw deal from life
• (Childrens Safeguards Review, 1997)

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Ongoing concerns about residential child care

• Another Kind of Home Skinner Report
• Childrens Safeguards Review Kent Report
• Historical Abuse Systemic Review Shaw Report
• National Residential Child Care Initiative

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Ongoing concerns about residential child care

• Defensive practice Kents sterile
  environment
• Poor outcomes
• education
• health
• employment
• Continued ambiguity about residential child
  care

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Anti-residential bias
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Issues with the family

• the ideal of the nuclear family
• from the nuclear family to the unclear family
• Measured against the cereal-packet norm of the
  nuclear family, it is complex, with children and
  resources linking households across space and
  time, in ways which render the identification of
  family with a single, discrete household
  wholly misleading. (Simpson, 1994)
• the breakdown of the family
• the root of lack of social cohesion
• the locus of poverty and social exclusion

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Family as metaphor in residential care

• Eddys always been there, but me and Eddy have
  bonded all well, thats what Im saying. I call
  him, hes my dad, you know what I mean, but he
  seemed to have always been there when I was
  restrained or, anytime Im angry, Ive left the
  building, he always seems to be there. (young
  person)
• (Steckley and Kendrick, 2005)
• She was like, a, like a sister, because we you
  know, we figured we looked alike and we were
  really close. She was like family to me. (young
  person)
• (Jim Anglin, 2002)
• I always regarded this place as my house..
  Everybody that was here was part of my family.
  All Ive wanted for the last three, four years is
  somebody to be there for me. Somebody I can turn
  round to and talk to. (young person)
• (BBC, Social Workers)

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Linking with kinship studies

• Cultural definitions of family are very
  different
• Cultures of relatedness
• biology/nature ? social
• structure ? process/lived experience
• Thus the ideas I describe lead me to question the
  division between the "biological" and the
  "social," between kinship as a biological,
  genetic, instant, and permanent relationship, and
  social identity as fluid. In Langkawi, ideas
  about relatedness are expressed in terms of
  procreation, feeding, and the acquisition of
  substance, and are not predicated on any clear
  distinction between "facts of biology" (like
  birth) and "facts of sociality" (like
  commensality). (Carsten, 1995)

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Families of Choice

• anthropological and sociological studies of
  gay and lesbian kinship
• disruptions to, and severance of, kinship ties
  experienced by gays who declare their
  homosexuality to their families.
• chosen families of friends are invested with
  certainty, depth, and permanence, and spoken
  about in the idiom of kinship

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Not simply families of fate or choice

• we have suggested that the imputed dichotomous
  contrast between given and chosen relationships
  is analytically shallow and that, in practice,
  there is a complex process of suffusion between
  familial and non-familial relationships.
• (Pahl and Spencer, 2004)
• children who, for whatever reason, are in
  state institutions may consider certain
  professional carers, highly committed to them, as
  given, although later in life they may
  recognize that their commitment could not be
  reciprocal.
• (Pahl and Spencer, 2004)

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Not simply families of fate or choice
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Blurring of boundaries

• The boundary between familial and
  non-familial relationships is increasingly
  blurred in everyday lives.
• There is certainly evidence for an extension of
  family relationships in terms of the language
  used so that individuals and practices may be
  described as being like family where it is
  clear that this is a positive evaluation. It is
  also evident from some of our studies that these
  non-familial intimate relations provide practical
  and emotional support for particular family
  members in such a way as to enable particular
  clusters of family relationships and practices to
  continue.
• (Jamieson et al. 2006)

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Children creating like-family kinship

• a special relationship that seemed like family
  with someone who was, geneologically speaking,
  unrelated to them.
• children liked the person and interpersonal
  and interactive elements were relevant
• shared biography and borrowed relational
  biographies
• creativity and electivity
• Perhaps most importantly, we have argued that
  childrens like-family relationships are forms of
  kin relationship that children value.
• (Mason and Tipper, 2008)

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• We met a number of participants who had
  experienced feeling accepted, secure and a sense
  of belonging in residential care. In the best
  experiences, participants thought of their
  residential carers as a kind of family What
  often characterised the positive relationships in
  residential care was the continuing sense of
  security and safety, which could be relied on.
• (Happer, MacCreadie and Aldgate 2006, p.17)

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Back to outcomes in residential child care

• a recent review and meta-analysis of research
  on residential child care concludes that
  children and young people, on average, improve
  in their psychosocial functioning (Knorth et
  al, 2008)
• the limited research on residential child care
  also found that generally children did better
  following time in residential care than they
  were doing beforehand (Forrester, 2008)

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Back to outcomes in residential child care

• when the nature of the aims of placements is
  taken into account, foster placements and
  residential placements were equally successful
  in achieving their specific aims (Kendrick,
  1995)
• if one takes account of behaviour, age and age
  at entry, childrens homes are not
  significantly less successful than other
  placements (Sinclair et al.,2007)

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The centrality of relationships between young
people and staff

• several of the studies of residential homes
  explained successful residential care
  according to the quality of the interaction
  between young people and adults. Terms used
  include empathy approachability
  persistence willingness to listen and
  reliability (Berridge, 2002)
• attachment theory, resilience theory have
  highlighted this centrality of relationship

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Whitaker, Archer and Hicks (1998)

• being ready to listen, both to the evidently
  momentous and to the apparently mundane
• being sensitive to a young persons
  readiness, or not, to talk and to share
  feelings and experiences
• combining non-verbal or symbolic forms of
  caring with verbal, explicit ones
• noticing good or admirable behaviour and
  crediting a young person for it
• marking special occasions in a young persons
  life with a celebration.

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Back to cultures of relatedness

• alongside individual relationships between
  children and young people and residential staff
  members
• the sense of relatedness brought about by
• routines, rhythms and rituals of daily living
• sharing of food
• involvement in cultural and leisure activities
• the living space and the environment

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• A sense of normality
• it would appear that creating a sense of
  normality for the residents without attempting
  to pretend that a group home setting is
  either normal or normative is vital for
  their sense of well-being (Anglin, 2002)
• Intimate familiarity
• importance of the fact that the
  relationships were possessed of a particular
  characteristic. I have come to think of that
  characteristic as intimate familiarity.
  (Garfat, 1998)

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• It is in understanding children and young
  peoples centrality in the complex mesh of
  relations, relatedness and relationships that
  residential child care must find its true
  potential.

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• They didnt treat it like residential, they
  treated me like family, basically there was one
  worker who treated me like a daughter it was
  more like a family home than residential (Female,
  17)

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• Anglin, J. (2002) Pain, normality, and the
  struggle for congruence Reinterpreting
  residential child care.Binghampton Haworth
  Press.
• Carsten, J. (1995) The substance of kinship and
  the heat of the hearth Feeding, personhood, and
  relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi,
  American Ethnologist 22, 223-241.
• Carsten, J. (ed) (2000) Cultures of relatedness
  New approaches to the study of kinship.
  Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
• Carsten, J. (2004) After kinship. Cambridge,
  Cambridge University Press.
• Forrester, D. (2008) Is the care system failing
  children? The Political Quarterly 79(2),
  206-211.
• Garfat, T. (1998) The effective child and youth
  care intervention A phenomenological inquiry.
  Journal of Child and Youth Care, 12(1-2)
• Happer, H., MacCreadie, J. Aldgate, J. (2006)
  Celebrating Success What Helps Looked After
  Children Succeed. Edinburgh Social Work
  Inspection Agency.
• Jamieson, L., Morgan, D., Crow, G. Allan, G.
  (2006) Friends, neighbours and distant partners
  Extending or decentring family relationships.,
  Sociological Research Online, 11(3).
  .
• Kendrick, A. (1995). Residential care in the
  integration of child care services. Edinburgh
  HMSO/Central Research Unit.
• Kendrick, A. (ed.) (2008) Residential child care
  Prospects and Challenges. London Jessica
  Kingsley.
• Mason, J. Tipper, B. (2008) Being related How
  children define and create relatedness, Childhood
  15(4), 441-460.
• Pahl, R. Spencer, L. (2004) Personal
  communities not simply families of fate or
  choice. Current Sociology, 52(2), 199-221.
• Simpson, B. (1994) Bringing the unclear family
  into focus Divorce and re-marriage in
  contemporary Britain, Man, 29(4), 831-851
• Sinclair, I., Baker, C., Lee, J. Gibbs, I.
  (2007) The pursuit of permanence A study of the
  English child care system. London Jessica
  Kingsley Publishers.
• Steckley, L. Kendrick, A. (2005) Physical
  restraint in residential child care the
  experiences of young people and residential
  workers. Childhoods Children and Youth in
  Emerging and Transforming Societies International
  Conference, 29 Jun - 3 Jul 2005, Oslo, Norway.
• Whitaker, D., Archer, L. and Hicks, L. (1998)
  Working in childrens homes Challenges and
  Complexities. Chichester Wiley.