Foster Care Victoria

I would like to take this opportunity to thank every foster carer for invaluable contributions to the lives of countless children and young people, and towards supporting and building stronger communities.

Foster care agencies rely on carers to provide full-time care, short-term, emergency, respite and mentorship, through to helping out with recruitment promotion and administration. Without volunteers, foster care would not exist.

The National Volunteers Week website suggests these ideas for doing your bit for this week.

• Call talkback radio and mention it is National Volunteer Week and that you would like to say thank you to every volunteer listening
•  Write a letter to the editor of your major daily newspaper thanking volunteers
• Personally say thank you to anyone you know who volunteers
• Suggest to your employers that they say thank you to staff members who volunteer and recognise their efforts
• Download the Certificate of Appreciation template and use that to recognise volunteers in your group

They also have a Fast Facts sheet.   

National Volunteers week is also a great reminder of the need for more people to become involved. For anyone who is considering becoming a carer, there will be an information night tonight in Ashburton, see the events listing for more details.   

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh appeared on the ABC’s Life Matters the other day discussing a new scheme to jail parents who leave children unsupervised to do things such as gambling, drinking or shopping.

While most of us would agree that leaving young children unsupervised for long periods of time for any reason is unwise and potentially life-threatening to these children, it seems like a huge jump from there to incarcerating their absent parents. Let’s think about our goals here for a minute - surely the primary problem here is that young children are being left without a caregiver for long periods of time? This being the case, incarcerating their primary caregiver, therefore making them unable to provide care for their child at all, seems like a rather self-defeating measure.

We must also take into account the huge cost of such an exercise as well as the potential strain on the already struggling foster care system. By putting in to place such a scheme we would also be knowingly placing some of the most vulnerable members of society in a criminogenic environment, which is in itself a major concern.

Surely the sensible thing to do is provide education and support to assist parents in understanding the needs of their children. Sanctions may be appropriate for repeat offenders, but let them be productive - compulsory attendance at parenting programs or a supervision order. More primary caregivers in prison is not going to solve anyone’s problems, least of all those of the child.

The audio can be found here, and a related article from the ABC website can be found here.

The Pyjama Foundation… taking time to read aloud to children    

The Pyjama Foundation Mentor Training Program equips volunteer angels to read aloud to children in foster care on a weekly basis.  The Program offers foster parents support and a well-deserved respite.  Our angels provide extra READING ALOUD experiences for children in care to increase the number of books read aloud to them and:

• assist improve their levels of literacy
• inspire a love of learning and a belief in self-worth
• help them to become confident people valued by our society

The Pyjama Foundation highlights the national importance READING ALOUD TO ALL AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN.

Thanks for letting us know about this organisation, Helen, what fantastic work!

Many foster care agencies also run mentorship type programs with various emphases and called various things, such as “Big Brother, Big Sister”, “Friends” and many others, but this is the first I’ve heard of a program specifically to support foster carers and foster children with literacy in particular. Currently Pyjama Foundation runs out of Queensland but we look forward to the national roll out!    

Although I agree with most of this report, I think there is room to increase funding without running the risk of attracting people for the wrong reasons, ie. money. Needless to say, there are many many differing opinions out there!

You can also listen to this story.

Media this morning is buzzing with 2020 ideas and debates, but I’ve searched and searched and found very few reported debates about what the foster care system should look like in 2020.

Indigo of the previous post has been involved in quite an informed debate here.

I’ll keep watching and hoping that more of the ideas discussed will filter through and hopefully bring about change.

The positive aspect of the Summit though was a really strong focus on preventative supports, which is an important contributor to the wider community solutions, together with strong mechanisms to support the essential contributions of foster carers.

An interesting debate has been sparked here after this post:

Researcher Indigo Willing, who was adopted from a Vietnamese orphanage in 1972, will propose a way to tackle the twin problems of long waiting lists for couples seeking overseas adoptions, and the chronic shortage of foster parents for children in Australia. Ms Willing said that if parents waiting to adopt were automatically asked to become foster parents — either instead of or as well as adopting from overseas — both problems would abate.

Though this plan looks like it ticks all boxes, experience tells us that its probably not as easy that. Firstly, the understanding that foster care is temporary care of someone else’s child is a cornerstone of the provision of healthy relationships to develop between child and carer, and if possible, with the birth family. There are often emotional obstacles for carers if there is a confusion of this role with other roles such as adoptive parents, where the child becomes your own.

Secondly, our state has worked really hard to create a screening process to make sure prospective carers are motivated by a desire to care for children in need. I think it would be problematic to blur the boundaries of the motivations towards one where foster caring is a means to another desire, and I’m not convinced that people in this situation, that is, forced to care, would be able to provide adequate care for that child.

Having said that, I myself have spoken at an inter-country adoption information session about foster care, inviting people who already have broad views about what makes a family to consider this area with significant success.

What we should focus on, in my opinion, is improving the supports around carers, as well as our valuing of the foster caring role to encourage more people to willingly take responsibility for caring for our neighbours.

The Youth Homelessness report has a specific section on Out of Home care (Section 9, beginning pg 225). This is part of the introduction:

Young people with a ‘care background’ are over-represented in the youth homeless population. The 2006 national census of homeless school students found that close to 15 per cent of homeless students may have had an experience in state care. In Project i’s sample of 200 young people entering SAAP services in Melbourne about one in five had been in care and protection at some point. Chamberlain and Johnson found that 42 per cent of adults and young people in SAAP have been in state care at some stage of their lives. UnitingCare Burnside (NSW) suggested several reasons for this:
Young people in care or those who have been in care have a heightened vulnerability to homelessness due to:

- lack of or disrupted familial connections;

- childhood trauma which in some cases may lead to learning disabilities and early disengagement with the education system;

- difficulty in finding foster carers for young people, particularly those with difficult behaviours arising out of their pre-care experience;

-multiple placements resulting in a lack of community connections.

 

These are just some of the reccomendations:

 

Recommendation 9.1

The NYC Inquiry recommends that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] consider a national inquiry into care and protection. The Inquiry should:

- review policy and practice on care and protection from a human rights perspective;

- consider new Federal-state cooperative programs and initiatives, especially early intervention and prevention in terms of family and community support;

- advise on what reforms, structures and processes are required;

- provide advice on how change might best be implemented and the scale of reforms and resources needed.

Recommendation 9.5

The NYC Inquiry recommends that all jurisdictions urgently review the level of funding provided to their care and protection programs, and develop a remedial strategy for addressing the selection, training and support of staff as well as the real need for care and protection services in the community.

 

 

With the release of the Youth Homelessness report there have been quite a few discussions and debates across the media in relation to tackling this issue.

Also, The Oasis, a documentary on this subject will be shown on ABC tomorrow night looks to be very interesting and although it won’t look at foster care specifically, many of the issues that put families and individuals at risk of child protection concerns also increase risks of homelessness. The accompanying website is also worth exploration.

While on the subject of national issues, perhaps this report is opportunistic in it’s timing with the 2020 Summit including a forum on “Strengthening Communities, Supporting Families and Social Inclusion”.

An article in the Herald Sun today raises questions about parents who put their children through painful cosmetic surgery. To see what you think about the issue, read the full article here.

Last night SBS’s Insight program explored questions around Child Protection and included a range of panellists, including former foster children or children who had in some way experienced the system, representatives from DOCS and DHS, case workers and psychologists. What fascinated me about this particular program was that mostly, there was a general consensus on a number of points (which doesn’t often happen on Insight!). These were that: 1) the system is not coping in most states and is therefore not meeting the needs of children 2) Victoria seems to have the strongest tradition and current system for preventative action 3) More funding is needed 4) the decisions about whether or not to remove a child are extremely difficult, so much so that two adult brothers still do not agree on whether they themselves should have been removed.

The program succeeded in amplifying to a larger audience these points, all of which anyone who works in the field could have reeled off in their sleep. I was disappointed however that the problem of the diminishing supply of foster carers was not mentioned. Even when Jenny Brockie seemed to push for fewer notifications to be left investigated and more children to be removed, no one raised the issue of a shortage of foster homes to place them in.

Brockie’s recurring question, “What are we going for the kids at risk tonight”, can only be answered in part by state departments, the bulk of the answer must come from us as a nation in terms of funding, and we as citizens of a community and our role in supporting families and children.

In the end, and in the words of a former foster child, what ‘kids at risk’ need is “even when I was, you know, a bloody annoying kid … to know that yes, there is someone out there that actually cares about them, that actually loves them and is not going to give up on them“.  

Kids at Risk can be watched online, and is also repeated on Firday at 1:30 and Monday at 3:30.