Socioemotional characteristics of minors in foster care: A comparison between the estimation of parents, teachers and children

Abstract

During the child's first few years, it's of fundamental importance the presence of a strong emotional base as long as it creates the possibility to open themselves to physical and social world with confidence, and as it acts as a facilitator of cognitive development. For this reason, if the family cannot ensure such base, social services are forced to resort to foster care, a resource that has a lot of difficulties, leading to different implications in the development of the child and of the foster family. It is therefore important to analyze in depth the socio-emotional variables that characterize children who are in a situation of foster care in order to provide adequate assistance to optimize their development. For this 32 minors in foster care, 31 foster parents and 28 teachers from the city of Valencia, were administered the BASC. The results highlight that parents are evaluating children, in general, worse than tutors. Specifically they consider children more aggressive, they detect more behavioral and attention problems and recognize in them a greater tendency to externalize the problems, while the teachers consider these children as with more social and adaptive skills. There were no significant differences between the scores of parents, teachers and children. High levels of psychopathology (which are clinically significant in various cases) and the fact that host parents evaluate minors as more problematic, are indicators of parents' and minors' need of support from public organizations.

Introduction

During the first few years of life, social development depends primarily on the child's interaction with their caregivers to those who they are emotionally linked, so that the emotional and social development are inseparable over the years and are largely responsible for the progress in the other areas of development. A strong emotional base creates the possibility to open themselves to physical and social world with confidence, and acts also as a facilitator of cognitive development. Unfortunately sometimes the natural family is unable to provide such base, so that a proper emotional development of children is threatened. Thus, in response to this need and in order to preserve the child, social services are forced to resort to the use of different measures of protection such as the income in a residence, the placement in extended family (in which other relatives as child's uncles or grandparents can take care of him) or foster care. Foster care is a measure of protection for the care of a child, that is exercised by a person or family who assumes the obligations to ensure him, take care of him, feed him, and educate and procure him a general education. Different studies (Becker et al., 2007, Jones, 2011) indicate that foster care offers greater advantages than the other options on the establishment of secure attachment, because it provides a standardized context which promotes the development. For this reason, this type of measure has been used mainly and, as the statistic measures of protection of children show, the 57.5% of children in care is in a foster care situation (Basic Statistics of Children Protection Measures. No. 11. Datas 2008). Anyway, although this measure represents an alternative to the situation of helplessness that can live a child in their family of origin, it is a resource that has a lot of difficulties, leading to different implications in the development of the child and of the host family. The process of adaptation to the host location, and the causes that provoked it, can affect socio-emotional children's development with the consequences that come out from it. Specifically, these children have been identified in higher levels of social anxiety and depression, poorer self-esteem, worse interpersonal satisfaction, less use of active coping strategies to solve their problems (Fernández-Berrocal et al., 1999, Liau et al., 2003, Mayer and Salovey, 1997) and poorer quality of interpersonal relationships (Ciarrochi et al., 2001, Ciarrochi et al., 2000, Del Quest et al., 2012). All these implications not only hinder a child's development, but also their ability to interact appropriately both with peers and with members of his new family. In addition, difficulties in establishing secure links also have an impact on school performance, getting low grades (Fernández-Berrocal et al., 2003, Newsome et al., 2000, Schutte et al., 1998) and scores below expectations in their cognitive development (Bachard, 2003), even to occur in some cases learning difficulties and attention problems (Ceccato, Gil, Molero, & Moral, 2012).

For all these reasons it is important to analyze in depth the socio-emotional variables that characterize children who are in a situation of foster care in order to provide adequate assistance to optimize their development.

Because of the existence of different figures responsible for minors' evolution and adaptation, the first objective is to check the consistency between the different points of view, of course, by the contexts in which each agent interacts with the child. Indeed, as underlined by Oosterman and Schuengel (2008), foster parent sensitivity and teachers' one defer in different aspects such as the assessment of attachment's safety and the assessment of the existence of internalizing and externalizing problems, underling how these different sources may have a different perception of emotional development of the child. Moreover, foster parents who observe the child in the home setting may perceive a different degree of involvement from the one observed by teachers in the school context, or even aware that their own child (Ceccato, Gil, Molero, Ruíz, & Ballester, 2011). On the other hand, Nguyen (2006) comparing the perceptions that parents and children have on the emotional and behavioral variables in adolescents in social disadvantage, underlines the presence of some agreement between the two sources.

Thus the main objective of this study is to collect information regarding the psychological variables and socio-emotional features that characterize children's process of adapting to foster care system, comparing the views offered by three different sources: the foster parents, teachers and children themselves. Our hypothesis, in line with the aforementioned studies, is that while there is some agreement between parents and children, it is not possible to find the same coincidence between the assessments of parents and teachers, highlighting the presence of some discrepancy in the perception they have on the degree of psychopathology and adjustment difficulties of the children they are living with.