Emerging Insights and Reminders
Social work attitudes powerful and variable by country
• Canada
• Social worker: 'With foster parents there is no family drama coming into the home. The drama comes into that [kinship care]
home, the kid never escapes it.' (Brisebois, 2011, p. 297).
• Denmark
• Social workers judge it as too demanding, requiring too much engagement with difficult emotions, seen as not able to match
capacity of 'professional' care
• Sweden
• Social workers divided on whether kinship care offers the 'glue that binds' or leads to 'obscuring a child perspective'
• UK
• what is especially attractive about kinship care for practitioners is the instinctive claiming of the child by kinship carer, which
is containing and normalising (Warren-Adamson and Stroud, 2015)
• Assumptions restrict and constrain or facilitate and open up ??
• But clearly, kinship care seen as important in many jurisdictions (e.g. Australia, Ireland (Republic), Scotland)