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Listen
1 Introduction and general context
Children looked after by local authorities
This study is about the daily lives of 24 children looked after by local authorities in Scotland. Eighteen were looked after away from home in either residential or foster care, while six were looked after at home on a supervision requirement. Looked after children are ordinary children who, as the study will show, engage in the same range of activities as other children. Some individuals are very active and busy while others have a narrower range of interests. Like all children, looked after children need to be given opportunities to be active and achieving, and to spend enjoyable time with those who look after them, their families and their friends. Like other children they also appreciate and need time to themselves within a life that is often characterised by periods of time dictated and organised by others. Choice about how they spend their leisure time is as important for looked after children as it is for other children.
Although they are ordinary children with the same interests as other children, looked after children are often living in extraordinary circumstances because of what has happened to them. Some children are resilient to change and will have retained their social skills, creativity and enthusiasm. The extraordinary experiences of rejection and maltreatment will have left others vulnerable, with their confidence eroded. As a result, they may not have the same skills in making new friendships and relationships with adults. At the same time, children may be living away from their own communities and be facing the challenge of being accepted by a whole raft of strange adults and peers. The most confident and mature child would find such a prospect challenging. It is even more daunting for those who are less confident and more vulnerable.
Those responsible for the daily care of looked after children have a duty to apply careful thinking, planning and additional resources, where necessary, to make sure looked after children have the same opportunities as others. This may mean finding a new music teacher, registering them at a gym or arranging transport so they can still play team games with friends. It is important that there are policies within all local authorities that allow for the individuality of every looked after child. A major source of complaint by children and their carers, for example, is that children cannot stay with their local friends without an elaborate vetting process. Sometimes, it is difficult because of a shortage of beds for children to have their friends to stay, where a camp bed might just solve the problem.
Creative solutions must be found to keep looked after children safe but also allow them to have as ordinary lives as possible so that any difference resulting from their looked after status is minimised. In some cases, it may take extraordinary effort to achieve ordinary experiences for looked after children. Such effort is not an option for professionals and carers but is a fundamental contribution to the building blocks of all aspects of these children's development, but especially to their social skills, confidence and sense of well-being.
Understanding the relationship between children's experiences and their well-being has increasingly become an important part of the context in which children's services are offered. Whether we are talking of universal concerns about children's obesity, the risk of smoking among young people or more specific worries about the educational attainment of children looked after away from home, how children spend their time is very much part of the current policy agenda.
There are several issues which inform approaches to understanding children's daily lives.
The concept of wellness
It is recognised that many factors may contribute to the physical and psychological wellness of children, irrespective of their circumstances. As Prilleltensky and Nelson have suggested:
Child wellness is predicated on the satisfaction of material, physical, affective, and psychological needs. Wellness is an ecological concept: a child's wellness is determined by the level of parental, familial, communal and social wellness (Prilleltensky and Nelson 2002, p.87).
Taking an ecological approach to children's development recognises that all of children's daily experiences will contribute to their overall wellness, and consequently, their well-being.
Glasses half full rather than half empty
One important strand in the wellness debate is the growing view that it is important to look at an individual's strengths and achievements. There has been a significant move away from looking at deficits to one which stresses strengths and achievements. Such an approach is equally applicable to adults and children:
The work of psychologists is moving from an emphasis upon the troubles, the anxieties, the sickness of people, to an interest in how we acquire positive qualities, and how social influences contribute to perceptions of well-being, personal effectiveness and even joy (Kelly 1974, quoted in Lorion 2000, p.5).
The optimism about growth and development has permeated research on children's development and well-being. There is a growing understanding that children can change their behaviour and equally, that children can recover from negative experiences of adversity, including the impact of rejection, separation and loss, provided they have subsequent experiences that help to build their resilience (Schaffer 1996).
Schaffer's optimism is validated by the work done in recent years on resilience as a protective factor in children's development. Resilience is defined as 'normal development under difficult conditions' (Fonagy et al. 1994). In the UK, Rutter's work on outcomes for young people, who have become resilient in spite of growing up in adverse circumstances, has given insights into experiences which are likely to protect children. Rutter (1985) cites three factors associated with resilience:
- a sense of self-esteem and confidence
- a belief in own self-efficacy and ability to deal with change and adaptation
- a repertoire of problem-solving approaches
Children's daily experiences will contribute to their resilience. Newman and Blackburn (2002), for example, have outlined a range of factors which can help to promote resilience:
- strong social support networks
- the presence of at least one unconditionally supportive parent or parent substitute
- a committed mentor or other person from outside the family
- positive school experiences
- a sense of mastery and belief that one's own efforts can make a difference
- a range of extra curricular activities that promotes the learning of competencies and emotional maturity
- the capacity to reframe adversities so that the beneficial as well as the changing effects are recognised
- the ability, or opportunity, to make a difference by, for example, helping others through volunteering or undertaking part-time work
- exposure to challenging situations which provide opportunities to develop problem solving activities and coping skills
Children's rights and parental responsibilities
The principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) support the view that both family and state should give attention to various aspects of children's lives, including education, care, recreation, culture and health, and children's social behaviour.
Concern about lack of opportunities and poor outcomes for children looked after away from home led to the development of the Looking After Children ( LAC) system in England and Wales (Parker et al. 1991). Children's progress is recorded along seven dimensions:
- health
- education
- emotional and behavioural development
- identity
- family and social relationships
- social presentation
- self care skills
(Ward 1995).
The LAC assessment and action records have been widely implemented within Scotland to record children's progress along the seven dimensions but there has been some inconsistency about their application (Social Work Services Inspectorate 2004).
The approach adopted by the looking after children framework is ecological, recognising that there are many influences on children's development and progress from within their families, their communities and from within the children themselves. The LAC forms are designed to ensure that there is appropriate assessment and actions in relation to children's progress. The way the forms are designed also means that it is possible for children to take the lead in their completion. This approach recognises that children have much to offer in evaluating their own progress and links to the view that childhood is a separate stage in itself, rather than a preparation for adulthood.
Children shaping their own lives
The fact that children can complete the LAC forms reflects the view of commentators that much more attention should be paid to children's participation and influence on factors that affect their own childhood (Clark and Moss 2001). It is argued that children have a right to participate in decisions and events that affect them directly. The mandate for children's participation comes from section 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, which states that children should be seen as competent individuals who can be consulted and involved in decision-making that affects their lives. This principle is enshrined in various sections of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995.
As well as helping children to shape their own lives, there is also a growing movement that recognises children are able to provide both a competent commentary on their own lives and contribute to both policy and practice. This idea is exemplified by writers who have described children as 'social actors' (Clark and Moss 2001; Sinclair 2004).
Such an approach means that children should have full participation in any policies and plans for services and should be empowered to put forward their own agendas. In other words, children should be seen as:
Fellow citizens with rights, participating members of the social groups in which they find themselves, agents of their own lives but also interdependent with others, co-constructors of knowledge, identity and culture, who co-exist with others in society on the basis of who they are, rather than who they will become (Moss 2002, p.6).
Moss has proposed using the concept of 'children's spaces' as part of children's services to translate this idea into practice. A good example of taking into account 'children's spaces' in Scotland comes from the consultation exercise carried out by Children in Scotland, as part of the Scottish Executive's policy review of special educational needs of children in 2001. This consultation involved over 100 young people who employed different styles of communication, including disabled children and those for whom English was not their first language. The project showed that children possess a range of influential resources for policy makers including information and knowledge. It also showed that translating children's views into action can be problematic if they do not fit into the adult agenda (Tisdall and Davis 2004). Indeed, one criticism of children's participation has been that children are often asked to respond to the adult agenda rather than set their own (Prout 2003). Consequently, it has been argued by commentators, such as Holloway and Valentine (2000) and Hill et al. (2004), that unless adults are willing to try to understand how children themselves see their daily lives, there will be shortcomings in any attempts to promote a child-centred approach to children's well-being:
It is important that adults thinking about children's lives, needs and education embraces not only the spaces to be found in formal provision by adults, but also those territories and pathways claimed by children for their own purposes in myriad locations within the areas they inhabit and visit (Hill et al. 2004, p.84).
Combining children's rights with children's perspectives is a feature of Ben-Arieh's international research on how children spend their time (Ben-Arieh 2002). Ben-Arieh believes that children's experience of childhood, as reported by them, should be counted alongside adult indicators of positive well-being in children and suggests:
A re-defined concept of children's well-being, therefore, can be guided by two underlying assumptions: that children are entitled to dignity and basic human rights, and that their childhood is also a stage deserving our attention and respect (Ben-Arieh 2002, p.153).
He goes on to argue that, in order to study children's perspectives on their well-being, measures need to be developed that take a child-centred approach:
To better understand what children are doing and how they feel about their lives and activities from a child-centred perspective and to promote their self-fulfilment, empowerment, and life satisfaction, measures must be developed to assess their activities (Ben-Arieh 2002, p.155. See also Andrews and Ben-Arieh 1999).
It was in the context of the debates about children's rights and children's well-being that this study was undertaken.
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