The Slow Evolution Of Foster Care In Australia

​This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a century. The book confronts foster care’s difficult past—death and abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public apathy towards these issues—but it also acknowledges the resilience of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but which often resonate with foster care globally.

This book explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.

This book considers the impact of digital media and technology on lived experience for young people in foster care. While the extent and intricacies of foster care—known as out-of-home care (OOHC) in Australia, where this study takes place—are not widely understood by the general public, youth in care might struggle to construct a personal identity that goes beyond reflecting the stereotypes and stigma by which they are often recognised. In today’s digital environment, media can play a significant role in any individual’s developing sense of self, identity, and belonging. Deitz and Sheridan Burns examine OOHC through the lens of networked media environments and investigate the conditions that encourage belonging and resilience in order to establish the role that digital technology can play in supporting those conditions for individuals, family networks, and the care sector.

This book draws together for the first time some of the most important international policy practice and research relating to education in out-of-home care. It addresses the knowledge gap around how good learning experiences can enrich and add enjoyment to the lives of children and young people as they grow and develop. Through its ecological-development lens it focuses sharply on the experience of learning from early childhood to tertiary education. It offers empirical insights and best practices examples of learning and caregiving contexts with children and young people in formal learning settings, at home and in the community. This book is highly relevant for education and training programs in pedagogy, psychology, social work, youth work, residential care, foster care and kinship care along with early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary education courses.

This open access book offers an unprecedented analysis of child welfare schemes, situating them in the wider context of post-war policy debates about the care of children. Between 1945 and 1970, an estimated 3,500 children were sent from Britain to Australia, unaccompanied by their parents, through child migration schemes funded by the Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches, religious orders and charities. Functioning in a wider history of the migration of unaccompanied children to overseas British colonies, the post-war schemes to Australia have become the focus of public attention through a series of public reports in Britain and Australia that have documented the harm they caused to many child migrants. Whilst addressing the wide range of organisations involved, the book focuses particularly on knowledge, assumptions and decisions within UK Government Departments and asks why these schemes continued to operate in the post-war period despite often failing to adhere to standards of child-care set out in the influential 1946 Curtis Report. Some factors such as the tensions between British policy on child-care and assisted migration are unique to these schemes. However, the book also examines other factors such as complex government systems, fragmented lines of departmental responsibility and civil service cultures that may contribute to the failure of vulnerable people across a much wider range of policy contexts.

This book provides rare insight into how real children/adolescents’ lives unfold as a result of health inequity. The authors present the findings of empirical research into the health and social circumstances of 61 Australian children/adolescents, as reported by healthcare professionals who attended to their medical needs, revealing how healthcare professionals deal with health inequity on the ground. Profound inequities in the health and wellbeing of children/adolescents worldwide have been the focus of intense research for decades. The extent to which children/adolescents’ health and wellbeing is impacted by violence, poverty, their inability to access integrated healthcare services, parental and adolescent substance abuse, unemployment, poor living conditions, poor nutrition, a fractured social support network, disrupted education, and lack of transportation, is widely recognized. While essential, statistical analyses alone cannot reveal the faces of those experiencing health inequity. This work highlights the need for urgent coordinated action to address health inequity so that children and young people have a chance to lead a full life in good health. It is relevant to researchers and practitioners whose work relates to improving children and young people’s lives. “This book should be required reading for those who influence policies developed by all the sectors mentioned above and their funding and administrative bodies – and politicians in particular” (Anonymous Reviewer).

Hugh Morrison argues that children’s support of Protestant missionary activity since the early 1800s has been an educational movement rather than a financial one and outlines how it has shaped minds and bodies for the sake of God, empire and nation.

Researchers, practitioners, journalists and politicians increasingly recognise that foster care throughout the world is in a state of crisis. There are more and more children needing care and, as residential alternatives dry up, more of these children are being assigned to foster families. This book reports the major findings of a two-year longitudinal study of 235 such children who entered the foster care system in Southern Australia between 1998 and 1999. As well as examining the changing policy context of children's services, the book documents the psychosocial outcomes for these children, their feedback on their experiences of care, and the views of their social workers and carers. In the process, the book examines some cherished beliefs about foster care policy and sheds new light on them. The research reveals that while most children do quite well in foster care up to the two-year point, there is a worrying amount of placement instability at a time when the concentration of emotionally troubled children in care is increasing throughout the western world. Although, surprisingly, placement instability does not appear to produce psychosocial impairment for a period of up to eight months in care, it has an extreme effect on children who are moved from placement to placement because no carer will tolerate their behaviour. These children are consigned to a life of distribution and emotional upheaval because of the lack of alternative forms of care. Another unexpected finding of the research is that increasing the rate of parental contact achieves little or nothing in relation to the likelihood of family reunification. As child welfare increasingly enters a world of research-based practice, Children in Foster Care provides some much needed hard evidence of how foster care policy and practice can be improved.