ABSTRACT
Peer relationships are likely to be formed and broken, or a friendship that is experienced as very important at one point may lose it’s significance as an adolescent’s school, college, workplace or interests change. The emphasis on adolescents facing outwards, away from their family of origin, has sometimes led practitioners in the field of family placement to doubt the wisdom of placing older adolescents in care in foster families. Adolescents who have so far experienced parents or parent figures as reliably available when needed, are able to move in widening circles outside the family as they negotiate the psychosocial tasks and experience the anxiety concomitant with new learning and change. Different behavioural patterns of secure and insecure attachment of young children to parent figures have been recognised and classified both by empirical researchers, clinical investigators, and practitioners.
