Case workers, child welfare services, and the psychological community alike have taken an interest as to the impact sibling separation has on an individual child. Sibling relationships are the most enduring of interpersonal ties and serve as important contexts for individual development (East & Khoo, 2005). The researchers wanted only to observe the effect that sibling relationships have on adjustment during tenure in foster care and other factors. A broad sample pool was used and factors such as age spacing, initial placement, duration of maltreatment, kinship vs. certified foster home, caregiver language, and disability were used as elimination (control) factors. This particular study used 78 sibling pairs (after elimination).
She developed on Bowlby’s IWM theory by looking at the individual differences on types of attachments that may be formed to the primary care-giver. Ainsworth looked at children’s behaviour during separation from their mothers, beginning in Uganda and a later study in the US Ainsworth developed the strange situation experiment as a standard test to measure attachment in children (Oates, 2005). From her results she discovered three main times of attachment. Secure, insecure (split into sub-categories) and absent (Oates, 2005). The way in which the child behaves during the strange situation is determined by the behaviour the care giver presents to the child.
There seems to be a misconception when it comes to older foster children, some of them do have emotional problems but when we look around us, with open eyes we will notice that many people have some type of emotional problem, they just are not labeled. Being moved from house to house is a very upsetting thing. If the child and foster parent cannot communicate it can cause distrust and placement issues (Crum, 2010, p. 1par 3). Many of the kids come from a neglected or abused home life so stability would be relief. The longer one is in foster care the harder it is to adjust unless you are in one home.
Although doctors, counselors, and foster care workers try their hardest to protect the children placed in foster care, the damage can and still does occur. After this occurs, the best plan of actions is to treat the child to correct the damage so the child can live a normal emotional life. According to the Society of Child Development, Inc, children at the infant stage of life need to form an emotional bond with a caregiver. That is normally the biological mother. Infants in biologically organize their attachment behaviors around the availability of their caregivers.
The lack of emotional care can possibly result in no attachment being formed. It can also result in permanent harm to the infants social and emotional development. The study conducted by Hodges and Tizard (1989) was of ex-institutional children. He aimed to see effects of children who had suffered early privation. He also wanted to test Bowlby's Maternal deprivation (or privation) hypothesis.
Rabiner (1999) quoted the results of a study conducted by Kaplan, Crawford, Fisher and Dewey (1998) which revealed that parents of ADHD children reported feeling considerably dissatisfied with their family life. The following quotation highlights the impact an ADHD child has on parents. A parent needs abundant love and wisdom, a parent must be knowledgeable about education, a parent must acquire the skills and sophistication in managing behavior that psychologists have acquired after years of study, and a parent must develop the patience of a model clergy man or woman. Although it can take a lifetime to acquire any of these skills, the demands of parenting an ADHD child necessitates that all of them be acquired in an instant. (Jacobs 1998, p. 1) as cited in Rafalovich 2000, p.
Bowlby’s theory of attachment is still relevant in understanding child care issues, but in a world dominated by parental issues psychological intervention may become a way of life. “Privation, when there is failure for a person to form an attachment to any individual- through a series of early different carers or family discord, Distortion occurs through lack of stimulation and affection” ( Woods, 2006, pg 139 ). Attachment issues may continue on in later life, a person could have trouble forming relationships. A person may feel the need to seek help with these issues and a good medium for help would be short term Psychodynamic
Parents with intellectual limitations are often eligible for community resources and should be referred for appropriate services. Parental Depression: Parents who are depressed often are less able to provide structure or to modify the behaviors of their children. They may appear withdrawn and lack energy and thereby pay little attention to, or provide inadequate supervision of, their children. They may also lack the energy to advocate for their child's needs. Inappropriate Disciplinary Practices: There is a great deal of controversy about ways to discipline children.
In the article “Just whom is this Divorce good for? By Marquart she explains, “We found that children of so- called “good” divorces often do worse even than children of unhappy low- conflict marriages. They say more often, that family life was stressful and they had to grow up to soon. They are themselves more likely to divorce and children of divorce feel like divided selves”. I would have to agree with that because I am actually going through my parents getting a divorce and when I found out I didn’t want to believe it at all I didn’t want to see my parents split up it just wasn’t right to me.
mTHCaroline Mauney English101-713 Charles Baker 22October2011 Foster Children Programs The foster care system in the United States addresses a precise set of cases--children who need temporary housing while their families sort out a difficult set of problems. Such children are likely to return to their families, but cannot do so until issues of employment, housing, and drug dependency are solved, which sometimes takes time. Many criticisms of foster care are based on practices that happened decades earlier (Jacobs).Today foster care is one useful tool in the arsenal of weapons available to social workers to assure that children are protected. Although In the United States this year, about half a million children