ABSTRACT
This chapter examines five groups of children for whom return issues are complex. They are: long-term returners, short-term breakdowns, and oscillators, adolescents seeking independence and homeless, skill-less adolescents. Whilst reliability and predictability of movement may be good news for children, they are no less welcome to social workers. The career routes of long term returners reflect the features of the children and families concerned. The word is used to describe children who move back and forth between parental and state care. Older children, and those from intact families, are obliged to rely on more ad hoc arrangements, usually organised in crisis. Oscillation has been assumed to be bad for children in some contexts, but not in others, whilst there has been little evidence either way. Planning for such children represented the triumph of obligatory professional optimism over experience in most cases, and social workers were generally reduced to keeping track of their clients’ movements retrospectively.
