ABSTRACT
Foster children are in an invidious position: most of them have a home somewhere but for a variety of reasons they must move out of it and live with strangers until some other adult works out what to do next. The dependence and powerlessness of children in this predicament are obvious, and the obstacles to their development seem formidable. On the face of it, it seems unreasonable to expect foster children to slip quietly and happily into placement, at least in the short to medium term. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the extent to which the foster children in our sample did adjust to care. In the first part of the chapter, we present the children’s placement movements and psychosocial well-being at each stage of the study. As previously indicated (see Chapter 3), Stage 1 spanned the period from intake to four months, Stage 2 from four to eight months, Stage 3 from eight months to one year, and Stage 4 from one to two years. Each section begins with a diagrammatic presentation of placement movements, in which a stable placement has been operationally defined as a single address throughout the period. An unstable placement, then, was one where a child had to change placement at least once in the period.
