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Adoption & Fostering
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DOI: 10.1177/030857590102500303
2001 25: 6 Adoption & Fostering
Gillian Schofield
Resilience and Family Placement: A Lifespan Perspective

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6 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
Resilience and family placement A lifespan
perspective
1
Many children who have suffered adverse child-
hoods of abuse, neglect and loss go on to thrive in
family placements. Gillian Schofield argues that
this process needs to be documented and under-
stood with the help of developmental theory. She
also suggests that there ought to be a lifespan
perspective, given that children need a family for life
and stable adulthood is inevitably a goal of family
placement. In this paper, the concept of resilience is
explored and then applied to selected cases from a
qualitative study of 40 adults aged 1830 who grew
up in foster care. Connections are also made to
attachment theory, since in family placement the
role of relationships is an important factor in
understanding outcomes. Implications for practice
are then discussed.
One of the most intriguing questions
facing researchers of adverse childhoods
is why some children have satisfactory or
even good outcomes despite experiences
which carry major risks for development.
This question focuses attention on what is
widely referred to as resilience, a term
increasingly popular in the family place-
ment field (Gilligan, 1997, 1999, 2000;
Henry, 1999). The concept of resilience is
very appealing as a way of trying to make
sense of the different developmental
trajectories of those who experience early
adversity and separation and spend much
of their childhoods in family placements.
When practitioners are feeling at their
most concerned or pessimistic about the
placement of vulnerable children, they are
inevitably interested in the idea that there
may be factors for some children that
outweigh or at least reduce the impact of
even the most adverse early experiences.
The family placement system needs
not only to provide families for child-
hood, but to enable children to grow into
Gillian Schofield is
Senior Lecturer in
Social Work and
Psychosocial
Studies, and
Deputy Director of
the Centre for
Research on the
Child and Family,
University of East
Anglia, Norwich
Key words: foster
care, resilience,
lifespan perspective
emotionally and socially stable and ful-
filled adults, partners and parents. These
longer-term goals mean that when
outcomes are thought about, there needs
to be a lifespan perspective. It is import-
ant to consider how the child being
placed today as a baby, five-year-old, ten-
year-old or teenager will fare at 20, 30,
40 years old and beyond, and what the
implications will be of that long-term
perspective for current practice.
Using a developmental approach
means taking into account not only res-
earch on family placement outcomes, of
the kind generated by social work re-
searchers, but also the theory and study
of different developmental pathways
generated by developmental psycholo-
gists and psychopathologists. The themes
of risk and protective factors, vulner-
ability and resilience in childrens lives
need to be understood within this
developmental framework. This is part-
icularly true of the complex lives of
looked after and adopted children.
This article will begin by considering
a case example from a qualitative study of
young adults aged 1830 who spent
much of their childhood in family place-
ments. This case will help to clarify the
questions we need to be asking when
using the idea of resilience to illuminate
family placement practice. The article
will go on to provide an outline of the
theoretical framework of resilience, with
some links made to attachment theory.
That framework will then be used to
explore in more detail further cases from
the study in order to clarify the useful-
ness of the concept of resilience. Finally,
some implications for practice will be
discussed.
With this first case example we have
two contrasting constructions of a life,
based on the same research interview.
1
This article is based on a paper given at the BAAF Research Symposium, 2000.
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 7
Jeffs stories
Jeff (aged 30) had been physically
abused as a very young child and was
out of control and violent. He says that
he injured his baby brother when he
was two-and-a-half. By the age of
three or four he was placed in the
residential care system, where he was
hard to control. At the age of five he
was placed in a foster family. Here he
continued to have behaviour problems,
especially at school, and remembers
being on sedative medicine till the age
of 12. At that point he was deemed too
difficult to manage in mainstream
school and was sent to a boarding
school for children with emotional and
behavioural problems, where he
remembers strict discipline. He was
discharged from care at about 13 and
spent part of his holidays with his
birth mother and part with his foster
mother. In his late teens he started to
drink heavily and committed several
offences of property damage, for
which he received non-custodial
sentences.
From Jeff s account of his life it was also
possible to construct the following story.
Jeff formed a very close and loving
relationship with his foster mother and
with one of his foster brothers. When
he went to the boarding school he was
found to have significant athletic
ability and saw himself as very suc-
cessful. He continued to visit his
foster mother each school holiday and
continued to call her mum, as he
does today. Although he had a difficult
patch in his late teens, his (foster)
mum was there at court to support
him. He always managed to stay in
work and by the age of 30 he had only
been out of work on two brief occa-
sions since leaving school at 16. His
(foster) brother had remained very
significant to him. Jeff had his own
flat and was engaged to be married.
He popped in to see his birth mother
for a coffee once a week, but said she
did not show much interest in him. It
was his mum, his foster mother, who
was the important person to meet his
new fiane. When asked how he
managed if he was ever worried or
upset now as an adult, he laughed and
said, Id just phone my mum.
This is a moving and inspiring story,
easily likened to a fairy tale, as if some
magic must have made it happen, bestow-
ing a happy ending on such an unpromi-
sing start in life. Of course, for other
foster and adoptive parents whose
children were so damaged that even ex-
cellent care could not turn them around,
such stories are little consolation. How-
ever, there is merit in using theory as a
way of looking closely at such intriguing
stories. Since, if we dont believe in
magic, we need to find more practical
ways of generating ideas and learning
lessons from both the worrying and the
heart-warming life stories from research.
But what was it for Jeff that his foster
mother offered that has steadied him
through into adult life? Also very import-
ant, what was it about Jeff that enabled
him to use the care that was on offer?
How was that capacity in itself created or
promoted in the caregiving environment
of the foster family?
The quality of relationships is clearly
very important here and this is a case
where the new family had become a
family for life, rather against the odds.
But this story doesnt reflect the perhaps
commonly-held belief that a successful
family placement must mean a total con-
tinuity of relationship or living arrange-
ments. In this story there were episodes of
trouble, separation and disruption. Yet
across various turning points, a term used
in the resilience literature (Rutter, 1999),
such as being sent away to school or
being in trouble with the police, it was
possible to see how downward spirals
could be halted and transformed into
upward spirals by the presence of sup-
portive relationships.
The metaphor of spirals is useful in
tracing developmental pathways (Sroufe,
1997). The image of a downward spiral
attempts to capture the momentum that an
accumulation of risk factors can have in a
childs life, making families and practi-
tioners feel helpless. Correspondingly, the
notion of an upward spiral in which
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8 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
raised self-esteem, for example, may
arrest the move into problem behaviours
and help build constructive relationships
suggests that positive change can also
generate its own momentum. In Jeff s
case one can speculate that it was a com-
bination of factors, such as secure avail-
able caregiving from the foster mother,
close sibling relationships, a sense of
shared fate with other foster children and
perhaps clear boundaries plus success
at boarding school that created what
Rutter (1999) has called a positive chain
reaction, leading to a rewarding and
stable adult life. Bowlby (1982) used the
metaphor of train tracks to capture this
phenomenon. The child may leave the
mainline track towards mental health, but
be brought back on track towards a
healthier outcome by experience, particu-
larly in caregiving environments.
The concept of resilience
At this point we need to interrogate
further what might be distinctive about a
child like Jeff, as he became an adult.
Tracking his life story gives us a sense of
the pattern of events, but may not tell us
enough to understand what resilience is
or the part that resilience may play.
Resilience has proved an awkward
concept to define, at least in part because
it is often explained and understood in
terms of a number of other elusive con-
cepts stress, coping, risk, vulnerability
(Garmezy and Rutter, 1983; Haggerty et
al, 1994). For practitioners, it is also
essential to keep bearing in mind what
resilience is not, since it has acquired a
number of common sense meanings that
need to be challenged.
First, it is important to dispense with
the idea that a child described as resili-
ent can be thought of as in any sense
invulnerable; resilience is always a rela-
tive term. Indeed it may be safer not to
refer to a resilient child if this is deemed
to mean invulnerability by other profess-
ionals. As Rutter (1999, p 120) puts it,
the focus is strictly on relative resistance
to psychosocial risk experiences. For
children looked after and in need of
permanent placement, the relative resist-
ance has to be shown in respect of some
significant previous and current psycho-
social risk experiences. Often there will
have been a combination of poverty,
neglect, abuse, separation and placement
moves. This is then followed by the
challenge of becoming a member of a
new and strange family, going to new
schools and meeting new friends. Then in
adult life there is the potential stress of
living still as a member of at least two
families birth and foster or adoptive
while attempting to build your own
family. Throughout, there is the task of
dealing with memories or stories of the
past. It would be surprising if any indi-
vidual could master each of these challen-
ges with the same degree of success.
The relative nature of resilience can be
understood further by considering the
varying degree to which children have
adapted to adverse and maltreating birth
family environments in the past or adapt
to their new family environments:
Resilience refers to the process of, cap-
acity for, or outcome of successful adapt-
ation despite challenging or threatening
circumstances. Psychological resilience is
concerned with behavioural adaptation,
usually defined in terms of internal states
of well-being or effective functioning in
the environment or both. (Masten et al,
1990, p 426)
This is an important and helpful defini-
tion. Key here is not only the idea of
adaptation to stress, but also the idea that
the capacity to adapt may be seen in both
the childs internal and external worlds.
In the internal world, a child may show
the capacity to reflect on a failure at
school, for example, as being merely a
temporary set back and still preserve their
self-esteem. In terms of functioning in
the external world, that child may also
have the ability to actively seek help with
the next school assignment. This is a
useful example, since the adaptive cap-
acity in respect to school of many of the
children coming into family placement is
limited. Looked after children often
become rapidly overwhelmed emotionally
by failure at school and have few internal
resources to assist in preserving self-
esteem. Similarly, few have skills in
obtaining or using resources available
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 9
from teachers, foster or adoptive parents.
Lack of skills to be active on their own
behalf arises not only from low self-
esteem but at least in part from a lack of
the sense of self-efficacy that is an
essential part of the capacity to adapt
(Rutter, 1985).
The ability to adapt constructively to
challenge has sometimes been referred to
as a self-righting tendency and this can
be linked to our understanding of resili-
ence. We can think about the psycholo-
gically healthy child as being like a small
sailing boat, making its way through a
mixture of calm and stormy waters. What
we hope is that even after a big wave,
which might threaten the boats stability
or tip it over, the vessel will somehow be
able to right itself so that it continues to
make progress. In boatbuilding techno-
logy self-righting is built into the con-
struction. It seems likely that building in
the capacity to adapt is an important part
of successful caregiving in birth or
substitute families. Insecurely attached
children from situations of abuse and
neglect have often learned to adapt defen-
sively to hostile or neglectful caregiving.
What is needed is an opportunity for
children to increase their behavioural
repertoire to include adaptive strategies
that lead to trust and intimacy in relation-
ships. This in turn not only fortifies
children in the face of challenge but frees
them to explore, to make choices and to
learn (Bowlby, 1982).
The relative resistance to risk, high-
lighted by Rutter (1999), will depend at
least in part on the nature of the stress
facing the child, since this will be inter-
acting with and testing the childs coping
capacity. Resilience should therefore be
seen not as a fixed characteristic of the
individual but as varying in relation to
different stresses across childhood.
Children may show resilience in relation
to some sorts of stresses and adversities,
but not others; similarly they may exhibit
resistance to some sorts of psychopatho-
logical sequelae but not others. (Rutter,
1999, p 135)
There needs to be a model of interaction
between factors internal and external to
the child. But what is also significant is
that this interaction is occurring along-
side the childs maturational trajectory so
that a developmental model of resilience
is required (Sroufe, 1997, p 256):
Resilience is not something some children
have a lot of. It develops. A capacity to
rebound following periods of maladapta-
tion (or to do well in the face of stress)
evolves over time within the total context
of developmental influences. The capacity
for staying organised in the face of
challenge, for active coping and for
maintaining positive expectations during
periods of stress are evolved by the
person in interaction with the environ-
ment across successive periods of adapta-
tion. And even as an acquired capacity it
is not static but is continually influenced
by ongoing changes in context.
These changes in context for children in
placement would certainly include the
major changes that occur when children
move to new families, but also as they
move from infancy through middle child-
hood to adolescence. Their life as an
adopted or fostered child is evolving and
the developmental consequences of their
experiences will not always be known or
be predictable, which is why it is so
important not to see resilience as a fixed
trait in a child. Children who appear to be
vulnerable can and should be encouraged
to gain certain coping strategies. But
apparently competent children may
become more fragile in the face of
particular childhood challenges and may
need additional support. Again, these
challenges may occur as part of normal
developmental transitions for the child.
For example, puberty faces all children
with questions about sexuality, the
capacity to be a parent, and identity.
These questions might be particularly
stressful for adopted and fostered child-
ren. Who am I? is not an easy question
to answer for children who have experi-
enced multiple families and where com-
plex identity issues of ethnicity, class,
culture and religion can be compounded
by profound dilemmas around the value
as well as the meaning of self.
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10 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
Resilience and the individual child
In order for professionals to use the con-
cept of resilience in practice, it is import-
ant to relate it to the developmental
pathway of the individual child. We need
to think about the various factors in the
child being assessed, the specific care-
giving environment and those particular
environments outside this family, which
have contributed to psychosocial risk
and the childs resilience (Gore and
Eckenrode, 1994). In recognising these
different factors and their various inter-
actions, the concept of resilience is thus
entirely compatible with an ecological
model, a systems approach (Bronfen-
brenner, 1979). In the child, genetic
factors such as temperament, level of
intelligence, physical competence or
impairment may provide risk or protec-
tion. In caregiving environments, in the
birth family or the new family, the quality
of physical and emotional care may build
into the child the potential for being
adaptable and coping with difficult
circumstances or they may build in
vulnerabilities to certain kinds of stress,
so that when the wave comes along the
boat is likely to be struggling. In environ-
ments beyond the family, poverty,
housing, the quality of education, social
work services and so on all have a part to
play, both in potentially causing stress
and in promoting or reducing coping or
adaptive capacities. This is very familiar
territory and generates quite lengthy
checklists in most social work assess-
ments. All of these factors appear, for
example, in the Framework for the
Assessment of Children in Need and their
Families (Department of Health, 2000).
An understanding of both inner and outer
worlds and the interaction between them
lies at the very heart of social work
practice (Schofield, 1998).
What Rutter, Sroufe and others have
pointed out, however, is that although the
accumulation of risk factors may cause
appropriate concern, the impact of any
one factor or accumulation of factors in
the child or the childs environments can
never be determined by a simple numer-
ical sum of risks and protection. What is
far more helpful is to think about the
nature of the processes or mechanisms,
such as cognitive appraisal (Rutter, 1987,
1999). It is necessary to consider not
only the nature of childhood experiences
but to know how the individual child is
processing and reacting to experience,
both positive and stressful. This has not
properly been part of ecological models,
although it is compatible with them, but
lies at the centre of the concept of resili-
ence. Events will have a different mean-
ing to different individuals and the
capacity to deal with stress will be in-
fluenced by the childs appraisal of the
situation. An understanding of the
experience and actions of parents and
children must take into account the
meanings they attribute to events and to
each other. This is well documented in the
child protection literature (Bugental et al,
1989; Reder et al, 1993; Reder and
Duncan, 1995), where the focus is on
parental attributions, the meaning of the
child to the parent. The importance of
attributions is less well documented in
family placement work, but in both
specialist areas there is a need to think
about childrens cognitive appraisal of
key events, the meaning of events and
relationships to the child. Fahlberg
(1994), for example, offered a useful
account of the impact of childrens
different cognitive appraisals of coming
into care. There are a number of ways in
which children make sense of this separa-
tion, she suggests, and each explanation
has consequences for childrens view of
their situation and their emotional
reaction to it.

Children may think that they have been

taken away from their parents or kidnap-
ped. This threatens their sense of confi-
dence in their parents power to protect
them and may lead to heightened anxiety.

Children may fear that they have been

given away by their parents. This
suggests that they were not good enough
and may lead to sadness and depression.

Children may believe that they have

caused the loss of the parent by some-
thing they have done. This kind of
magical thinking may lead to the child
feeling excessively powerful and
responsible for subsequent events.
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 11
Such meanings will affect the capacity of
the child to cope with change, the stress
of loss and the challenge of new families.
Life story work at its best can help here,
but more important are the qualities of
caregivers who themselves are able to
think through with the child the experi-
ence of separation and the hopes and
fears for the new placement (Schofield et
al, 2000). These caregivers can acknow-
ledge and work with that individual
childs set of meanings.
The childs self-esteem will be an
important part of the picture and has been
described as acting as a filter for experi-
ence (Harter, 1987). It may impact on all
areas of development. The degree of self-
efficacy, the childs sense that they can
manage a new situation and have strat-
egies for achieving proximity or getting
help from an available adult, will also
influence a wide range of emotional and
behavioural outcomes. Self-esteem and
self-efficacy will together affect cognitive
appraisal and the ability to adapt to chan-
ges and challenges. Resilience includes
the ability to be active rather than just
reactive to new situations. Rutter and
Quintons study of young women from
backgrounds of institutional care found
that the capacity to plan and make
choices, including adult life choices of
jobs or partners, appeared to be highly
protective (Rutter and Quinton, 1984).
Attachment and resilience
Without wishing to divert the debate away
from resilience at this point, it is import-
ant at least to note here the conceptual
overlap between resilience and attachment
theory, since attachment theory is pro-
bably the most popular developmental
framework for family placement practice.
The conceptual overlap should make
practitioners feel comfortable about using
both frameworks and both terminologies,
since they are entirely compatible. One
key conceptual link relates to what
Bowlby (1982) described as the internal
working model (see also George and
Solomon, 1989; George, 1996; Howe et
al, 1999). This is a cognitive framework
that reflects the individuals mental
representations of the self, others and
relationships. Self-esteem and self-
efficacy are central to the concept of the
internal working model, reflecting the
childs belief in their own lovability and
capacity to be active in their own
survival, the confidence in the care and
protection available from significant
others and the expectation of the predict-
ability of significant relationships. In so
far as the internal working model de-
velops and indeed evolves in response to
the quality of the caregiving environ-
ment, then it can be seen as compatible
with Sroufes developmental framework
for understanding resilience. Sroufe
(1988) has also contributed to the appli-
cation of attachment theory to the under-
standing of child development, and the
concept of different developmental path-
ways is closely connected to the quality
of different caregiving environments.
In addition, the concept of adaptation
lies at the heart of attachment theory as it
does of resilience. This refers to the way
in which the child adapts to the care-
giving environment, which will determine
the pattern of secure or insecure attach-
ment (Ainsworth et al, 1978; Bowlby,
1982; Howe et al, 1999). Both resilience
and attachment theory see the child as an
active participant, an actor in his or her
own life, subject of as well as subject to
the events that make up his or her life-
story. Attachment theory would suggest
that from the earliest hours, days and
weeks of life the child is interacting with
the caregiving environment and having an
impact on it as well as reacting to it
behaviourally and internally processing
and dealing with it. Adaptation begins
rapidly as infants learn to utilise, deal
with, cope with or, at the very least,
survive their caregiving. These adapta-
tions organise themselves into patterns
of behaviour. Even older so-called dis-
organised children have to find ways of
controlling and manipulating their
environments, particularly if they are
being maltreated, in order to survive
(Carlson et al, 1989; Crittendon and
Ainsworth, 1989; Crittendon, 1995;
Howe et al , 1999). Their adaptive strat-
egies may be destructive in certain
respects, they may not look like resilience
mechanisms, but in the sense that they are
functional they may be necessary (for a
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12 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
more detailed discussion of resilience and
maltreatment, see Mrazek and Mrazek,
1987).
One further conceptual overlap is that
both frameworks rely on systems theory
as a way of describing the complex inter-
actions which lead to different outcomes
for children. Although attachment theory
is most closely associated with caregiving
relationships and resilience is sometimes
seen as reflecting relationships with the
wider world (Gilligan, 1999), both
frameworks properly understood take into
account all levels within the ecological
model, from the internal world of the
child through different caregiving
environments and on to wider environ-
mental considerations, such as the con-
text of social pressures or supports that
can affect the development of children for
better or worse.
Case examples from research
As we turn to consider further case
examples in more detail and apply these
seemingly abstract ideas to practice, the
importance of this multi-layered, inter-
actional approach across the life span
should become clear. These two case
examples are the life stories of adults
who grew up in family placements. Like
the case of Jeff mentioned earlier, they
come from a qualitative study conducted
by the author of 40 young men and
women living in a range of local author-
ities. The criteria for identifying the
sample was that the subjects should be
aged 1830 and have spent a significant
part of their childhood in one foster
family. Eight were of minority ethnic
origin. The sample was gained oppor-
tunistically from those who were still in
touch with agencies, foster carers, in-care
organisations and so on. It included
adults who were in a range of situations:
from unemployed through to university
educated and professionally trained;
living alone through to established as
parents in stable families. The sample was
not representative of all adults who have
experienced long-term care but does offer
particular insights into what it means to
have lived in a long-term foster family.
The aim in selecting these two cases
was to identify some key factors in the
histories of adults who, like Jeff, had
been seriously at risk developmentally
and yet progressed to lead stable adult
lives. These cases cannot be described as
typical or representative of the sample,
but nor are they exceptional. The degree
to which adults felt that they had over-
come or resolved childhood traumas and
the extent to which their adult lives were
felt to be rewarding varied across the
sample. The case examples were chosen
specifically to demonstrate how the con-
cept of resilience can be used to explain
the diversity of experiences in a child-
hood in care and something of the
legacies in adult life. They also helpfully
demonstrate the power of relationships in
a way that allows us to make connections
with attachment theory.
Jennies story
Jennie is the white mother of a one-
year-old child and was aged 21 at
interview. She came into care at the
age of 18 months and went straight
into a planned long-term foster
placement where there was a birth son
and she was the only foster child. The
family had good holidays and Jennie
did ballet and horseriding. She
remembers the carers as having high
expectations of her and being rather
emotionally undemonstrative, but she
regarded them as her mum and dad
and their son as her brother. Jennie
remained in this family until aged 14,
when following a very stormy period
she was moved to another foster
placement. She settled well in this
second foster family initially, but then
started stealing and being more
rebellious. Her life became increas-
ingly chaotic and at age 17 she was
moved to a mental health hostel for
adult women. Jennie ended up on
various forms of medication and
finally took an overdose. From the
hostel she was moved to supported
lodgings for one year and has since
lived independently.
What was striking about Jennies account
of this story was that it appeared that
there were some key turning points and
that each experience had given her some
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 13
experience or resource which she draws
on in adult life. Her first foster family had
given her an experience of a stable family
life where she had a predictable and
stimulating environment. They did
become her family in a very real sense.
Her second foster family had been very
emotionally demonstrative and she said
she learned there about the pleasure of
being open and being cuddled. The hostel
was a very negative experience for her
and she said she ought to be paid com-
pensation for going there, but she also
said:
I learned there that my life is smooth,
perfect compared to a lot of people. Ive
got it well easy.
The carer who offered supported lodgings
was a source of strength, was fond of her,
available for her and taught her how to
survive practically with cooking and bills.
This carer took her in as a difficult
teenager in crisis and gave her much more
than lodgings. This was a key turning
point in Jennies life. She had lost two
foster families, had acquired a mental
illness label and was very vulnerable as a
young person soon to be beyond the usual
systems for looked after children or care
leavers. However, in terms of the accumu-
lation of risk and protective factors, it
seemed likely that the stability and con-
tinuity of care through her early child-
hood, followed by the warmth of her
second foster carers had probably assisted
her in making use of this relationship
when it was offered.
In adult life Jennie has a number of
resources, both internal and external.
Although she has some problems with
self-esteem and in her close relationships
with partners, she feels quite comfortable
with other people on the whole and has a
circle of friends. She has addressed a
group of DipSW students on the subject
of social workers, about whom she is
quite positive. To use the language of
attachment theory, Jennies mental repre-
sentation of others seemed to be that at
least some people could be trusted to care
about her.
Jennie runs her life with care; she is a
planner and tries hard not to get into debt
she is the only one among her circle of
friends who has a phone that hasnt been
cut off. Her original foster family has
remained very much in touch since she
left seven years ago at the age of 14. They
were there at the hospital when she had
her baby and provided the new pram.
They are grandparents to her child and
offer some support. Jennie says of them
now:
My real family is my foster parents, no
matter what anybody says. Theyll always
be my mum and dad.
Her foster brother is very close and
regularly comes to see her and they go for
walks together. If she had a problem with
money or practical things she would ring
up her supported lodgings carer, who
remains very available for her. She said of
her:
Shes excellent. Shes open and every-
thing. Like shes very down to earth. If
youve got a problem I guarantee shell
sort it out.
This supported lodgings carer, who was
not expected to provide a long-term
family for Jennie, nevertheless provided a
family environment and a close relation-
ship which offered her availability, care
and protection that has extended into
adult life.
Jennies social worker from age seven
for about eight years remained in touch
and has been a constant figure, showing
an interest in her welfare, even though
she has now moved on to a management
role in the agency. This is perhaps the
best kind of life story work to be in
touch with a young woman at 21 whom
you knew when she was a little girl, to
help hold the memories and the reality.
And there are her birth parents, whom
she finds difficult to deal with because
they mix with offenders and, when they
visit, they bring a lifestyle into her home
that she very clearly wants to reject for
herself. Her mother, who did not see her
during her childhood but reappeared in
her teens, has been a great disappoint-
ment to her. Jennie describes them as
just people who come round. She wants
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14 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
now to move further away from them
physically and emotionally, but this will
be her decision based on her own appraisal
of the relationship and the kind of person
she wants to be.
Jennie still has some thoughts from
her past that trouble her and which reveal
themselves in specific anxieties, for
example about hygiene. She still has
questions that have no answers. Primarily
she wants to know, Why me?. In the
meantime, she is doing her best to make
something of her life with her son.
In summary, Jennies pathway, like
Jeff s, has not been straightforward and
yet as an adult she is relatively stable as a
young mother with her child. We can
think about this process in terms of
evidence of resilience, but also simul-
taneously in attachment terms. The
strengths in her history, the protective
factors, were in a series of caregiving
relationships. Over time we can see that
she entered upward and downward spirals
within particular placements. The overall
picture though is of some carers who not
only formed close relationships but also
continued those relationships after place-
ments had formally ended. For Jennie,
the possibility of building on previous
good experiences is always there, along-
side the risk that loss itself poses.
Although this pattern of serial relation-
ship building would not fit the commonly
held but mistaken view of attachment
formation as occurring exclusively in
infancy, it is consistent with Bowlbys
premise that if the caregiver provides a
secure base it will assist the childs cap-
acity to explore, regulate feelings and
move into subsequent relationships. Here
we see in Jennie a child in a downward
spiral once she has left foster family care
in adolescence, who is only restored to a
more healthy trajectory once she meets
with another caregiver who values her
and gives her reliable care.
In applying resilience and attachment
theory, the capacity to think and the role
of cognitive appraisal are key develop-
mental factors. Interesting within the
process of this interview was the fact that
Jennie had some capacity to reflect on her
experience (Fonagy et al, 1991). She was
able to see both the strengths and
difficulties in her placements/relation-
ships and did not need to idealise them,
denigrate them or dismiss any as unim-
portant. She was able to reflect on and
evaluate carers and her own behaviour in
ways that offered an appropriate and
realistic mix of good and bad. This
capacity to reflect seems to have been an
important part of her self-righting
tendency, although as an internal resource
it seems unlikely to have been strong
enough to cope without the ongoing
external support from the available
sources of security in her life.
Melanies story
Melanie is white, was aged 24 at the
time of interview and had a four-year-
old child. Her case was chosen as an
example because her family for life
was found late and because she had
the capacity to articulate the distinc-
tive qualities of a foster family that
promotes resilience.
Melanies birth parents both had
alcohol problems and she was physic-
ally abused by her mothers boyfriends
and lodgers staying at the house. She
described carrying knives to bed to
protect herself and her brother. She
came into foster care at about the age
of eight and was then placed in a long-
term foster family. She remembers the
period in this foster home as being an
unhappy time in many respects for her.
Although she attended school and was
given reasonable physical care, emo-
tionally it appears that there were
significant problems. The carers acted
strangely, for example calling in a
spiritualist medium to find out what
was wrong with her. At the age of 14,
after a stormy period, the placement
broke down and Melanie moved
briefly to a short-term foster family
before moving into a third foster
family, where she remained until
moving to independence.
Here, in this third foster family, Melanie
found an experience that was completely
different to what she had known before:
When I first went there . . . I was . . .
sorry . . . Im going to get emotional here
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 15
. . . Theyre the only people whove . . .
ever . . . done anything for me. The first
time I met them, David [foster father] sat
and talked to me as if I was somebody . . .
He werent talking to social workers, what
does SHE like? But talking to ME about
it. And I just remember . . . I just couldnt
stop crying. I didnt understand what was
going on . . . Id just been moved 25 miles
from my friends at school. I didnt know
how Id cope with all that . . . a new
family . . . but he was . . . they were just
brilliant, they turned me right round. If it
hadnt have been for them I wouldnt
have got any GCSEs, I wouldnt have
been able to read and write, I wouldnt
have the life I have now. I dont know any
other way I can explain them . . . .
As Melanie admitted, life wasnt all plain
sailing and she continued to be a
rebellious teenager at times. Like Jennie
she was able to reflect on herself in a
fairly balanced way and on this experi-
ence of caregiving without idealising the
carers, saying that they were quite strict
for example. But what she emphasised
was the constant availability of her foster
carers. She told a story of going to a
disco while on holiday to illustrate this
quality in the caregiving relationship:
David didnt want us walking to the disco
so he took us and he stayed there all
night just to make sure we kept safe . . .
He stayed all that time even though that
must have been as boring as hell for him.
. . you know, a teenage disco, but he
stayed there, you know, and walked us
back . . . thats the one that springs to
mind.
Here Melanie recalls how a parent was so
concerned for the safety of his child that
he put his own needs as secondary to the
childs needs. Note here also her capacity
to reflect on the feelings of the carer, to
show empathy. The fact that Melanie
stored that memory and produces it as an
adult out of all the memories of her
childhood is also a striking example of
the power of such caregiving experiences
to shift meanings or mental representa-
tions and to restore a childs faith in
others and in their own worth. This
apparently minor event is a good
example of an attachment related story,
valued as a marker of secure parenting in
the analysis of the Adult Attachment
Interview (Main and Goldwyn 198494).
Melanie left home at 17 but continued
to see the foster family as her family. Her
foster father gave her away at her wed-
ding and her foster mother gave ongoing
support to her as a parent:
I can phone Anne [foster mother] up now
and if I have a problem shell say, Ill
come round and talk to you or . . . When
I was living there and said, This is
upsetting me or something like that I
knew that I could sit down and wed have
a conversation about it. Shes the only
person in my life who would sit down and
tell me what she honestly thinks I should
do . . . and shell give me honest and true
. . . theyre just wonderful people . . .
brilliant.
What the foster carers had provided
for Melanie was not only raised self-
esteem but also an encouragement to feel
confident in her abilities, and in their
continuing care and concern. They had
effectively given her a secure base
(Bowlby, 1988), in attachment terms, on
which to build. This had become an
upward spiral, a chain reaction in resili-
ence terms, in which, although Melanie
still found her foster carers very support-
ive, she had been able to build her own
stable network of close friends, she was
in a secure relationship with her husband
and was able to use her mother-in-law for
additional support in parenting her child.
With each challenge mastered, she felt
more confidence. Like Jennie, those
shadows from her childhood and some of
the anger did not go away. She had very
bad dreams at times. She was also con-
scious sometimes of the need to get the
balance right between flooding her own
child with the good things she didnt
have herself as a child and setting appro-
priate boundaries. But again for her there
was a self-righting tendency, in which
she drew partly on her capacity to think
through her difficulties and partly on her
capacity to seek help from those she
trusts.
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16 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
Theory and practice
These two stories, and the story of Jeff
mentioned earlier, each have elements of
surprise. The accumulation of risk factors
in each case, the experiences of maltreat-
ment in infancy, placement moves and
breakdowns, late placements, brief
placements, impermanent placements,
separation from siblings, a childhood in
care and so on would be expected to
reduce the likelihood that a child would
form constructive and stable relationships
in adult life. Indeed these individuals
were still to some extent troubled adults.
The emotional work was ongoing and
some of their feelings of loss and hurt
may never be entirely resolved. But foster
carers had been able to provide a buffer
against the worst consequences of early
damage, to use a resilience concept, or a
secure base, to use the attachment term-
inology. They had been able to promote
some key coping skills. The emotional
availability of carers and their capacity to
stay with these children through thick
and thin demonstrated the role of
relationships in promoting resilience.
Those relationships could also offer role
models and practical help through school
and employment, fortifying the child for
the outside world. Jeff, the first case
example, had been set a powerful model
in the foster home of men as grafters,
workers and providers, a code which he
lived by in his adult life. Jennie had been
taught how to shop and budget by her
supported lodgings carer. Melanie had
been helped to catch up on her education
and achieved GCSE passes. However,
these messages for survival outside the
home were built on relationships and
were inseparable from the care and
concern offered to the children. This
parenting was showing the same charac-
teristics noted by Mary Ainsworth
(Ainsworth et al, 1978, discussed in
Howe et al, 1999, and Schofield et al,
2000) in her description of the parenting
that securely attached infants receive, ie
sensitivity, acceptance, co-operation and
accessibility.
The choice of these three cases
demonstrates the differences and similar-
ities that emerge from life patterns
through the care system. Jeff had had a
continuous relationship with his foster
carer and attachment figure, in spite of
leaving care at 13. Jennie had had a
breakdown of the relationship with her
permanent carers and of the placement,
but she gained new relationships and
some links were preserved with perm-
anent foster carers, whom she called her
real parents. Melanie had experienced
abuse in her birth family and unsatisfac-
tory care in her first long-term placement
before reaching the family that became
her family for life. Although these were
different pathways in some respects, they
had in common the fact that harm that
had been done in early relationships had
been healed to some extent through new
relationships in substitute families.
There are some simple ways of
summarising the messages for practice,
although implementation will continue to
rely on the exercise of good professional
judgement in individual cases. First, this
study suggests that the impact on adult
life of each caregiving environment in
childhood may not always be dictated by
the length of time, the legal status or, in
some cases, the age at which the secure
substitute family experience is offered.
Secondly, it is likely to be the quality of
the caregiving environment and the
available relationships that will make the
difference so that the family becomes a
family for adult life as well as childhood.
This is true not only of the long-term or
permanent placements but also of those
intended to be short-term placements,
which can offer a great deal to troubled
children and adolescents in crisis. Early
decision-making and placement for
permanence must continue to be a
priority for developmental reasons that
are well documented. But what needs to
be added to the picture is the fact that
good experiences, turning points, can
occur late. Older children who were not
fortunate enough to have found a
permanent family young, or for whom
that placement broke down in the teenage
years, can still recover with the help of
sensitive care in foster families. Some of
the adults in this study did not reach the
family that became the most significant
as a family for life until they were 1214
years old.
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ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001 17
What appear to have been protective
were:

In childhood: placements that built

internal sources of resilience through
offering a secure base and promoting self-
esteem and self-efficacy, not only within
the family relationships but also in the
range of other relationships/activities
where children need to feel confident and
effective (see also Gilligan, 2000;
Schofield et al, 2000). These internal
resources included the young adults
capacity to achieve comfortable intimacy,
to think and reflect on situations, to make
choices and to seek out/use support.

In adult life: the continuing availability

of significant adults, former caregivers in
particular but also other networks, who
offered love and support to young people
who remain vulnerable and continue to
need a family.
Furthermore, in the transition from
childhood to adulthood, the powerful
lesson to be learned for those who work
with young people leaving care is the
importance of prioritising continuity in
relationship into adulthood as well as
building the skills for independence, even
where family placements appear to have
broken down. In some cases, this is a
question of facilitating continuity, but in
others, it may be possible to find a new
family to offer support in adult life when
a child is about to leave care, whether to
go to work, to go to university or to
parent a child. The importance of
interdependence rather than independence
has long been a recommendation of the
leaving care literature (Stein and Carey,
1986; Biehal et al, 1992), but is rarely
given the priority in practice which this
study confirms could be a key factor in
promoting well-being in adult life.
Conclusion
This article is intended to contribute in a
small way to what is an important debate
about the benefits of using developmental
theory to inform social work practice and
in particular family placement practice
(Howe et al, 1999; Gilligan, 2000). It also
demonstrates the usefulness of making
connections between different theories, in
this case attachment and resilience, by
considering detailed case material.
There are two final points to be made.
First, the resilience literature encourages
us to retain a developmental perspective
across the lifespan that seeks to identify
multiple and interacting factors and
processes. It suggests that we should not
see any single aspect of experience as
determining outcomes.
The quality of resilience resides in how
people deal with life changes and what
they do about their situations. That
quality is influenced by early life experi-
ences, by happenings during later
childhood and adolescence and by
circumstances in adult life. None of these
is in itself determinative of later out-
comes, but in combination they may serve
to create a chain of indirect linkages that
foster escape from adversity. (Rutter,
1985, p 608)
Secondly, we need to support children
and young adults in their struggle to
overcome early adversity. A good under-
standing of their experience based on
developmental theory is invaluable in this
process.
The very last word is from Gary, aged
22, one of the young people in the
research study. Here he comments on
growing up in care.
Theyre trying to put a stigma on it. There
is a lot of stereotyping. To some extent
theres a lot of prejudice. I had a run-in
with a middle-aged lady at a party some-
where. She said something sweeping,
Kids in care, they grow up and theyll be
robbing grannies and that. I overheard
and Im not exactly the most backward in
coming forward person. I just turned
round and said, Well actually, I grew up
in care, Im in the Royal Navy, Ive been
in six years. Im the third youngest in my
rank in a 45,000 manned service. And I
grew up in care. What are you going to
say about that? She sort of stood there
flabbergasted. I said, There are people in
care who have horrible problems, but
they are decent members of society. And I
walked off.
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18 ADOPTION & FOSTERING VOLUME 25 NUMBER 3 2001
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