What Makes Good Foster Parents?

The assessment of prospective foster parents is an important task based on skilled, but largely unevaluated, methods. This study attempts to describe the characteristics, personal background and motivation of all the foster mothers used by two inner city teams who had had at least one child placed with them for a year or more. The chief motivations and childhood experiences of the foster mothers were compared with ratings made by the fostering officers of their excellence as foster parents. The study confirmed that two motivations for fostering, which have often been held to be reasonably good predictors of ‘success’ in caring for deprived children, were, in fact, associated with an acknowledgement on the part of experienced fostering officers that the parents who claimed to act from such motives had a good capacity to fulfil the demanding role of a foster parent: firstly, a desire to parent a child, when it was impossible to conceive a child of one's own; and secondly, an identification with deprived children as a result of unhappy experiences in childhood—experiences which the foster mothers had had the resilience to cope with, and use creatively. In addition, it emerged (somewhat to our surprise) that foster parents who claimed to act from motives of social concern and altruism were also seen by fostering officers to have demonstrated a real ability to foster children. Nearly three-quarters of the foster mothers were emphatic that the experience of fostering had enhanced the quality of family life. For childless couples, the satisfaction seemed to come from caring for children; but for couples who had children of their own, the satisfaction seemed particularly to lie in helping children who had been deprived of a normal home life, and in bringing up children whom they could not see as extensions of themselves.