The majority of youth protection systems rely on a fundamental principle: all efforts should be deployed to enable the children to stay within their family environment. However, in Quebec as everywhere else around the world,... [ view full abstract ]
The majority of youth protection systems rely on a fundamental principle: all efforts should be deployed to enable the children to stay within their family environment. However, in Quebec as everywhere else around the world, an important number of children do not grow up with their biological family due to situations compromising their safety or their development. Foster care occupies an important place on the continuum of services offered to young people and families facing difficulties. As of March 31st 2015, nearly 11 000 children were placed in substitute care for their own protection (ACJQ, 2015). All efforts have to be deployed so that the children reintegrate their biological family as soon as possible. Nevertheless, some placements will lead to permanency, either as a long-term placement or through adoption. In Quebec, on average a little more than 300 children are adopted each year (ACJQ, 2013). The majority are adopted through a program called « Banque-mixte » (BM) (Pagé et Poirier, 2015), which allows children considered at high risk of abandonment to be placed in a foster family with a possibility for adoption. This family is committed to adopting the child if he becomes freed for adoption. The adoption can be done with or without the consent of the birth parents and it is a definitive and irreversible solution. Indeed, adoption in Quebec exists only in its plenary form, meaning that a judgment for adoption severs the original filiation in a definitive way. The social and judicial intervention process leading to adoption represents an extremely difficult ordeal for the child’s biological mothers (Jackson, 2000, Smeeton et coll., 2010). The support provided by social workers demands much knowledge and social skills. As underlined by Lamour (2010), in such an impossible parenting context, social workers are confronted to much suffering: the child’s, the mother’s and their own, thus hampering their ability to intervene (Lamour, 2010). Despite these findings, the realities of the parents and the social worker, in this unusual context of having to remove children from their biological family in preparation for adoption, remain largely unknown. The main objective of this communication is to present the results from two complementary studies which aim to shed light on this experience from the standpoint of social workers and biological mothers. The first study, done with 15 social workers, aimed at describing their intervention experience with mothers presenting signs of relinquishment that could lead to adoption in some cases. During semi-directed interviews, they testified on the signs of relinquishment observed during the mother’s support, the importance of describing and voicing things in a perspective of transparency, the respect of the mother’s pace of progress, the demonstration of kindness and avoiding to make a judgment against the mother’s situation. Finally, they illustrated a few obstacles while supporting these mothers, belonging either to the mothers, to the life experience and weaknesses of the social worker or else, linked to the intervention context of youth protection and it’s legal framework. The second study was conducted amongst 10 mothers whose child was freed for adoption following the intervention of youth protection agency. These mothers participated in two individual interviews where they addressed their history, their role as a mother, their experience with youth protection services and the judicial system. Their discourse will be paralleled with the discourse of the social workers to identify the most promising practices to support mothers living a placement context leading to the adoption of their child.
Family foster care and adoption , Participation of children and families in child welfare interventions
