Family Membership
Caregiving dimension five
Family Membership is the fifth of five caregiving dimensions that make up the Secure Base Model. This article highlights how it can be applied to your role as a carer and the likely developmental benefits for your foster child.
Helping your foster child to belong.
We all need to feel we ‘belong’. We take it for granted when we’re part of a family unit, however small. We don’t question our acceptance or inclusion. Because of this, we’re able to explore and develop personally. We feel safe because we have a secure base from which we can experience the world.
The Need for Family Membership
Because of this, it’s vitally important to understand the need for family membership, from your looked- after child’s point of view.
To develop healthily in an emotional and psychosocial way, children need the supportive anchor of belonging to a family. If they don’t have this unconditional, practical and emotional support, they will experience feelings of dislocation. This will make them feel isolated and unable to relate to others in their wider environment.
This diagram shows how family membership fits into the caregiving cycle.
What Will Your Foster Child’s Expectations Be of Family Life?
To begin with, it will be helpful to acknowledge that your foster child will bring with them many experiences of their former family life. This will have coloured their expectations of their new family and how they might become a member of it. The adjustment needed as they leave behind their birth family can seem overwhelming. They will have positive memories of their early family life, as well as the negative, painful ones.
How Will They Cope with Feelings of Loss?
Whatever their early experiences were, your foster child will be battling with many feelings of loss. They will almost certainly feel the loss of certain people. They may be missing a much-loved pet. There will have been places which were familiar and important to them. They will be missing friends, too.
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Their Feelings of Anxiety
Your foster child will experience anxiety around fitting into their new surroundings and family group. They may wonder if anyone really wants them and if they will be safe.
Their Feelings of Uncertainty
They will probably feel uncertain about their future, wondering if they will stay with you for a long time or have to move on again. All these aspects will be shaped by their age and developmental stage.
Try to Identify with Their Feelings of Uncertainty
You will recognise that feeling of waking in unfamiliar surroundings when on holiday. Finding your way to where breakfast is being served will be a little adventure. Everything will seem ‘strange’, but this is a temporary, happy change and you have your home and your secure base to return to. For your foster child, there is no such certainty, and the future might look frightening and vague.
Be Sensitive to Their Feelings of Loss
You will need to be sensitive to your foster child’s feelings of loss and to the breaking of strong family ties they have left behind. Even though some of these ties to their birth family members might be destructive and inappropriate, they have been important to them. The loss will be painful to them, whatever the quality of the relationship. Familiarity and habit are part of everyone’s feelings of security.
Finding a Balance
A balance must be found between your foster child’s membership of his birth family and their membership of your family. This will vary according to the overall plan for them and to the quality of their relationships within both families.
Adapting Their Likely Perception of Inclusion According to Length of Stay
If you foster child is to stay for a short placement, close ties with their birth family and events within it should be nurtured. Even so, they will want to be included in their foster carer’s family. In a long-term placement, they will need to be accepted and included in their new family as a full-time and all-embracing member. Their place in your family will reach into adulthood, and perhaps beyond. Usually, some contact with their birth family will be arranged and encouraged. This will have to be managed carefully and constructively.
The Challenges and Conflicts of Finding a Balance
The balance to be achieved between your foster child’s belonging to their birth family and to your family is likely to be challenging. There are conflicting and powerful concepts to be taken into account. They will identify both with their birth family and with their foster family.
Remember What You are Aiming at Providing
As a foster carer you must aim to provide emotional warmth, physical comfort, acceptance, and support. You also need to have reasonable boundaries in place to promote harmony in shared family life.
There will be huge variations on this model. Culture, class, language, and religion will determine its shape and style.
The link to the ‘Secure Base Model’
You will appreciate how all this relates to a firm understanding of the secure base model. With a sensitive approach, you will be providing all the desirable qualities of a ‘good’ foster family, while nurturing your foster child’s feelings and needs related to their birth family.
Helping Your Foster Child to Feel Accepted in Both Families
As a sensitive caregiver you will need to discover ways of providing verbal and non-verbal messages promoting feelings of belonging to both families. These messages need to be appropriate to your foster child’s ongoing needs and circumstances.
Identity
You will be aiming to endorse your foster child’s sense of a flexible, yet cohesive, identity which reflects their membership of their birth and foster families. For the sake of their psychological and emotional well-being, they must not have to endure a fragmented and conflicted identity. They, and you, will be finding a way through an often complex network of relationships.
How Will Your Foster Child Progress?
They will gradually feel more comfortable with the idea of belonging to more than one family group. Their feeling of security will grow as they feel included in your family group while being able to express their membership of another family. They will be confident in talking about their birth family. Gradually, they will learn to process their inner conflicts and mixed feelings. They will develop an integrated sense of self and feel comfortable in being a member of more than one family.
Family Membership within this model focuses on how to help your foster child feel like they belong. Learn about the other caregiving dimension that are contained within the Secure Base Model.
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