Webinar Overview
Every year, nearly 400,000 children pass through the foster care system. Today’s child welfare policy considers a permanent family setting a “right” for all children removed from their family of origin. As mandated by the Adoption Assistance & Child Welfare Act (AACWA) of 1980 and the Adoption & Safe Families Act of 1997, all children in custody must have a “permanency plan.” A permanency plan legally mandates connections to family and caregivers in a form of a “forever home.” There are four ways children leave foster care for permanent homes: reunification with birth parents or primary caregivers, adoption, guardianship, and placement with relatives. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, among children exiting foster care each year, nearly half, about 100,000 kids, are reunited with a parent or primary caretaker. Unfortunately, every year, approximately 20,000 youth leave foster care without a permanency plan.
The child welfare system placing 100,000 children in “forever homes” should be applauded by practitioners and policy makers alike. However, when one takes a deeper dive behind the numbers and applies the concept of “ambiguous loss,” the idea of achieving permanence, at least for the youth removed from their families, isn’t so clear.
Ambiguous loss, a term coined by psychologist Pauline Boss, is a loss that remains unclear and without official verification or immediate resolution, which may never be achieved. The people we love can be (1) physically gone but kept psychologically present (i.e., a missing person) or (2) physically present but psychologically gone (e.g., someone with dementia, or drug addiction).
Researcher Gina Samuels, and others, has applied the concept of ambiguous loss to children who have been removed from their family by children services and or juvenile court and transitioned, often, depending on the circumstances in an out-of-home care. Samuelson (2009) wrote, “The use of ambiguous loss theory provides a compelling lens to theorize (im)permanence and examine the very notion of what is ‘family’ from the perspective of young adults who have aged out of foster care.” Writers Lee and Whiting proposed a third element of ambiguous loss that foster children may experience: relationships in transition. “Relationships in transition” refers to individuals in the foster child’s life may be perceived to be active members of the birth family, the foster family, or both. However, many of these relationships may not be permanent. Children services and or the courts can reunite or disband birth families and children may or may not be adopted by their foster family. Add relative placements or kinship care to the child’s life and often boundaries become unclear about who is supposed to be regarded as family and who is only temporary. For the child who is amid multiple transitioning relationships, feelings of confusion, hopelessness and ambivalence typically impede progress identifying and fulfilling case goals toward permanency.
The relational push and pull for children in congregate care can be especially stressful and confusing. Youth are given the message to cooperate with the program, open-up and trust the staff, get better, then they have to say goodbye.
This presentation will include the results of Samuelson’s research project looking at the impact of ambiguous loss through the interviews of 29 youth placed in foster care, group homes and residential programs. Samuelson concludes that youth often consider the loss of their family long before children services steps and, perhaps even more compelling, youth have their own idea of “permanence” regardless of the “official” permanency plan.
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