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Foster family in view of biological children
Havlíčková, Tereza Noemi ; Šulová, Lenka (advisor) ; Šturma, Jaroslav (referee)
The diploma thesis is concerned with the long-term foster care; particularly with the experience of foster carer's own children. It provides knowledge of the alternative care system in the Czech Republic and the particularities of foster families. It describes how own children of foster carers experience the period of time before their foster sibling's arrival, what are their feelings and reactions after the arrival, how their positions in the family change, how their relationships are formed and how they perceive their parent's decision retrospectively. The theoretical part is followed by empirical part which is composed of quantitative and qualitative research. The results of quantitative research introduce the experience of biological children and create a basic idea of the situations in foster families. The conclusions of the qualitative research are then an addition of the quantitative part and help to a better imagination of the life in foster families. This thesis should contribute to foster care applicants, their children and specialists who work with foster families. Key words alternative family care, foster care, foster family, biological child, foster children, foster carers training, siblings
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Psychological impact of fostering on biological children of foster parents.
TÁBOROVÁ, Pavla
Foster care is currently being discussed a great deal, in particular in connection with the planned shutdown of infant care centres. Currently it is preferred to place a child in foster care rather than in institutional care. However, attention should not only be paid to the children placed in foster families. The families that receive the children should also be given a lot of attention. Within a family, one cannot only consider the adults who will become foster parents for the placed children, as a family can also have existing children. This bachelor´s thesis focuses on children, on the biological children of foster parents, as their attitude to foster care can significantly influence the situation in a newly created family. The theoretical part of the bachelor´s thesis consists of three parts. The first tackles the family as a primary socialising agent, the second deals with the relations between siblings, and the third focuses on substitute family care. The aim of the practical part of this thesis was to find out what psychosocial impact the parents´ fostering can have on their biological children. A partial goal was to find the fostering positives and negatives for the foster parents´ biological children. A quantitative approach was selected to obtain information. Data collection was executed with the help of semi-structured interviews with selected respondents. The selected respondents were the biological children of foster parents. The thesis results provide information about the impact parents´ fostering can have on their biological children and about what these children consider as the positives and negatives for them stemming from fostering. Subsequently, the results of the interviews are compared with each other and with professional information sources. Within the framework of the survey, it was found that the psychosocial impact of fostering revealed itself mainly in the following areas: the respondents learned to live in a group, help their parents, and be more independent; they had to learn to communicate with children who had also had bad experiences; and they had to cope with the reactions of those around them for whom their family was something unusual, something that attacted more more attention. One of the respondents felt the impact of foster care in that some people respected him more becaue of it. For one of the female respondents, the arrival of the child in foster care was stimulation to stop relying on her parents and on the fact that they were one family and she felt the need to be herself more. The mentioned positives included family experience that could come in handy in the future; helping parents; an active and diverse family life; people´s acknowledgement; independence; improved mental state of the mother; parents becoming closer to each other; and moving to a village. The mentioned negatives included family size with regard to transportation and admissions; people´s stares; losing their parents´ time; the suffering of the parents when they were accused by those around them that the unsuitable behaviour of the received children was caused only by their upbringing; and the fact that the children-in-care received various gifts from foundations, but the biological ones did not. Only in one case was foster care assessed primarily negatively, with the cause probably being the fact that the parents were not interested in the opinion of the biological child, that they knew the child did not agree to the reception of a child-in-care, but they did it regardless. In other families, the opinion of the biological children was important; they had the possibility of participating in the decision of whether or not a child would be received in foster care. This could be the main cause of the overall positive assessment of foster care.
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