ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the complex feelings of children caught up in family disruption, including conflict with their care-giving parents, sibling rivalry and co-dependence, problematic contact with their birth family and surviving enforced social isolation. It addresses the anxieties arising from conflict, divided loyalties, sibling rivalry and lockdown in adoptive and foster families consequent to the children's experience of neglect and disruption in their previous families, including foster placements. Although squabbles are normal and the way we learn to deal with conflicts, rivalry between maltreated siblings sometimes requires a far higher level of parental vigilance, which makes the task of parenting them very challenging. Children's need for contact and information about their birth family changes as they grow up. In the UK, nearly 50% of families break up and reconstituted families have become commonplace. While many single families and stepfamilies are successful, the course of renegotiating relationships can cause the children to experience anger, resentment and anxiety.
