Family Ties and Child Placement

The fundamental premise of this paper is the primacy of the child's experience of biological-familial continuity in establishing his sense of self and personal significance. This paper examines the effects of current child placement practices on the child's ties to his biological, foster, and adoptive families. It explores alternative practices that would take into account biological-familial continuity.Comment is invited. In a real sense, this paper can be thought of as a sequel to my identity paper (6), in which I describe my experience as a foster child and my successful reestablishment of contact with my biological-extended families. At the end of that paper I raised a number of questions about the need and the right of the individual to "know" his biological and familial roots. This paper is an attempt to begin to answer those questions and, I hope, deepen our understanding of the complex and rich relations between a person and his biological families, both immediate and extended. The central premise of this paper is that the child's experience of biological-familial continuity and connection is a basic and fundamental ingredient of his sense of self, his sense of personal significance, and his sense of identity. It is my contention that consistent consideration given to this premise would result in better child placement practice and procedure. Painful ruptures that particular life circumstances cause for some children and their biological parents and extended families can be offset. The critical issue is the maintenance of the child's and the biological families' mutual emotional bondedness so that the child grows up, at the very least, emotionally connected to his biological families and, if possible, with tangible connections as well. Both child and parents can retain a reciprocal sense of themselves and a sense of their roles in a still larger family system. The goal of this paper is to examine the effects of current child placement practices on the child's ties to his biological families and, in some cases, foster families. Although the relation between family ties and the placement of children has in the past and there is an extensive literature on the topic summarized by Kadushin (11), this tissue has not been addressed systematically across a variety of child placement settings such as care of children of divorced parents, foster care, adoptive care, and the placement of children in crossracial and crosscultural settings. This paper will explore the way child placement policy and practice might function if the reality of both the child's ties to his biological family and their ties to him were deliberately considered in planning for her or his placement. For the purposes of this paper the family system is defined as all members of the child's family both living and dead who are biologically related to one another. As well as all members of the step-family, foster family, or adoptive family. Included are all members of the nuclear family and extended family on both sides. Murray Bowen (3, 4) was one of the first family theorists to understand and to describe the interconnectedness among the various parts of the nuclear and extended family systems. Ivan B. Nagy and Geraldine Spark (2) have richly enlarged our view of the way family ties function in their book, appropriately entitled, Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy (2). Salvatore Minuchin et al. (20, 21, 22), in their work with ghetto families, have focused their attention upon the continuously impacting ecological system composed of the larger social-economical-political contexts such as neighborhood, school, church, courts, and welfare agencies that daily affect the life of the family. They are concerned also with familial intergenerational contextual factors. It is becoming increasingly clear that when a child is cut off from his biological family system there is for the child, the parents, and the families involved a deep mutual sense of personal loss. Weiss (30) and Roman (25) speak of this loss with regard to the children and parents of divorced families. Colón (6) and McAdams (18) speak of this loss for children and parents who experience foster-child placement. Benet (1) and Trisiliotis (27) address this loss as it applies to children and parents who experience adoptive placement. Haley's book, Roots, (9) does not focus directly upon the crossracial and crosscultural placement of children, but the story still speaks powerfully to such arrangements. The uprooting of African blacks for the slave market and the crossracial and crosscultural adoption of Korean and Vietnamese children inevitably involves profound loss of racial, ethnic, and cultural ties in addition to familial cut-offs. These considerations suggest the hypothesis that persons who experience unresolved emotional cut-offs from significant others are persons at higher risk emotionally and psychologically than those who have resolved such cut-offs. The psychological response on the part of the person who has lost contact with a "familial-other" because of permanent cut-offs in family ties is strikingly similar to the reaction one sees in persons who are bereaved by the death of a loved one. When my ten foster brothers left our foster home at different times, there was no opportunity for further contact with them. I experienced their leaving and the permanent cut-offs from them as a series of depressions. I was forced to work my way _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________