EDUCATION IN A SYSTEM OF LIFELONG EDUCATION: PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE SUPPORT PROCEDURES FOR FOSTER FAMILIES
M. Yu. Lobanova
One of the actual ways to provide social and sociopsychological support to children who are deprived of the opportunity to grow up in their own families is the development of the institution of foster care, in which foster parents are able to effectively defend the rights of children and patronize them after they reach adulthood. It is the foster family, created on the basis of a contract, which can provide a comfortable social and psychological atmosphere for a foster child.
Currently, however, has been a history of termination of contracts. The termination of contracts is often influenced by the very nature of a foster family: foster children are able to communicate with their biological parents, who can set their children against the foster parents, and with the resumption of parental rights, they may even withdraw their children from the foster family. The particularities of interrelations between parents and children in foster families also have an influence. Practice has shown that the main causes of socio-psychological problems in the interrelations between foster parents and their children are: (a) difficulties in the "parent-child” relationship; (b) complications in the child adapting to a foster home; (c) insufficient consideration by the foster parents of the age-related and individual characteristics of the child; (d) insufficient use of a differentiated approach in the preparation of foster parents, etc. The reason for these problems is the contradiction between the practical need for the establishment of foster families and the lack of adequate training for foster parents. The presence of this contradiction causes the need for creation of a psychological training procedure for foster parents in order to identify resource families and to prepare them for foster care and for forming the optimal relationship within a foster family.
In this article we will try to highlight the psychological and pedagogical procedure for support of foster families.
The institution of family is currently in crisis, aggravated by the instability of the economic situation in the country. Crisis phenomena find expression in the increasing number of children left without parental care, on the one hand, and the growing number of parents who for one reason or another cannot have children, on the other hand. Experience has shown that prospective foster parents can be divided into several groups: (a) the
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group of potential foster parents aged approximately 30 years, who for medical reasons cannot have children; (b) the group of prospective foster parents who have already raised their children and who still have nurturing potential and a desire to raise another child and have the material conditions for this; (c) the group of prospective foster parents who are religious and church-going, for whom the education of child or orphan is considered a service to God; (d) the group of foster parents with many children who have three or more of their own children, but whose grandparents and great-grandparents had from 7 to 12 children; (e) the group of adoptive parents who have already had experience with foster care and want to take additional children into their care; (f) the group of single parents (more often women than men) who are in desperate search for personal happiness and want to give a warm heart to a child, hoping for reciprocity; (h) the group of parents (usually caretakers or teachers) who are consider the establishment of a foster family as a means of income.
Such a diverse audience implies the development of different approaches to supporting a foster family. It seems appropriate to consider the procedure for supporting foster families. The procedure for support that we offer a foster family provides: (a) the identification and support of resource families; (b) revelation of the indications and contraindications in foster care; (c) the interrelation of education, monitoring, prevention, diagnosis, training, and individual therapy with formation of the competences required to prepare families for foster care; (d) a clear distinction of the place and role of a foster parent in respect to the foster child and his biological parents; (e) prevention of the emotional burnout of foster parents. The reasons that determine the specific nature of working with potential foster families are: firstly, the socio-cultural characteristics of Russian families (in patriarchal families, several generations live together and are connected to each other both emotionally and financially); secondly, the reduced number of the family is often determined by the cultural and historical characteristics of the family’s development; thirdly, a low level of psychological culture that manifests itself in a low motivation for receiving psychological assistance; fourthly, the consultation in regards to the possibility of receiving a foster child into the family is attended by the family member who experienced the desire to have a foster child, and other family members remain in the shadows.
All this makes the direct transfer of Western experience to Russian soil almost impossible. Development of criteria to determine what constitutes the effective nurturing potential of foster parents and the compatibility of foster children and foster parents is a difficult problem in the work of specialists. The need for development of a procedure for support of the foster family was prompted by a number of reasons: (a) the lack of
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Russian psychological research to reveal the effectiveness of prospective foster parents’ nurturing potential and their compatibility with foster children; (b) evaluative diagnostic tools can be used with the goal of preventing failures and evaluating the effectiveness of procedures for support for foster parents. We consider a psychological and educational procedure to be a definite system with content, tools, and methods of training and education, targeted at addressing psychological tasks (according to R. V. Ovcharova).
The procedure of psychological support for a foster family is a complex of interrelated and interdependent measures, introduced as various methods that are implemented by the subjects of the holistic pedagogical process in order to ensure the optimal psychosocial conditions for preservation of the mental health and full-fledged development of the personality of both the foster child and each member of the foster family.
The main objective in support of prospective foster parents is: (a) optimization of family resources; (b) identification of strategies and tactics for response in family crisis situations; (c) search for the optimal stabilizing agent in the family system; (d) training the family to independently cope with stress caused by the foster child’s search for an optimal place in the family system. An additional objective is to develop flexibility in the family system and a willingness to change.
Features of the procedural characteristics for the support of foster parents are a strict phasing of the work of a psychologist. The stages of a psychologist’s work can be represented as a sequential set of procedures: the procedure of psychoprophylaxis and monitoring with the goal of advertising, screening potential foster families, and the formation of public attitudes to issues of abandonment and foster families;
the procedure of diagnostics of prospective foster parents with the goal of identifying and supporting resource families;
the procedure of training potential foster parents in the framework of the group education the School of Foster Parents, etc.
Only a professional approach to retraining specialists working with the family in the framework of lifelong education ensures mastery of the procedure for support of foster families on the part of psychologists, social workers, and teachers. Currently within the Department of Psychology at the Institute of Qualification Improvement for Educational Workers (Nizhny Novgorod) with the support of the Department of Health and the Department of Education a program for training specialists to support foster families has been developed, in which psychologists and social workers in Nizhny Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod region have already completed the training. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, 50 experimental venues for the support of adoptive parents have been opened.
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