Kinship care: uncannily close for comfort?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the impact of kinship care upon the child, as observed through the clinical lens of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It acknowledges the social care and policy landscape, which retains a widely held belief that kinship care is a preferable option to foster care. In the light of this belief, the paper also draws attention to the internal and external dynamics inherent in the complexities of this arrangement as presented in the child’s psychotherapy and the parallel parent work. Clinical vignettes are used to illuminate the often unconscious, painful and confusing thoughts, feelings and fantasies experienced by both the child and the kinship parent. Psychoanalytic ideas relating to Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ and Winnicott’s paper ‘Mirror-role of the mother and family in child development’ are used to underpin the clinical material and reflections. The paper culminates in emphasising the need for practitioners to be attentive to these dynamics, and to provide robust support for the kinship parents, in processing their kinship experience and the intergenerational traumas it may stir up.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic
• kinship care
• policy
• child psychotherapy
• intergenerational trauma

Acknowledgements

We would especially like to thank Janine Sternberg for her supervisory contribution to this paper, and also many past and present child and adolescent psychotherapy colleagues, supervisors, supervisees, and trainees, who have been generous in broadening our understanding about kinship care and contributing ideas from their clinical experience. We are not naming them in the service of confidentiality.

Disclosure statement

This paper uses three composite cases, which have been developed through combining details of the many therapeutic encounters during the psychotherapy careers of both authors. However, the authors have also worked to remain faithful to the essence of these clinical encounters, whilst ensuring that families would not recognise themselves in the material.

Notes

1. The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (McAllister, May, 2022) states: ‘The dysfunction of the current system means that many relatives are forced to become foster kinship parents in order for them to receive financial support to look after their kin. Special guardians and kinship parents with a Child Arrangement Order should receive a new statutory financial allowance, legal aid and statutory kinship leave. A wider set of informal kinship parents should get a comprehensive support package’. (p. 10) It is to be hoped that these recommendations will be put into place.

2. This is a composite case drawing from a range of clinical material, whilst also closely adhering to conflicts the authors have experienced in their therapeutic work with children in kinship care.

3. As before, this is a composite case drawing from a range of clinical material, whilst also closely adhering to conflicts the authors have experienced in their therapeutic work with children in kinship care.

4. As before, this is a composite case drawing from a range of clinical material, whilst also closely adhering to conflicts the authors have experienced in their therapeutic work with children in kinship care.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deirdre Ingham

Deirdre Ingham has worked as a psychotherapist for 25 years, initially as an art psychotherapist and later as an IPCAPA trained child psychotherapist. She currently works as a child psychotherapist for a CAMHS in London where she is in the Looked After Children’s Team (LAC) and the Therapeutic Outreach in Primary Schools Team (TOPS). Through her independent practice she teaches for IPCAPA; is an infant observation seminar leader; and a reflective practice group facilitator for the charity PAUSE.

Julia Mikardo

Julia Mikardo has been a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist in CAMHS in London before retiring from the NHS in 2021. She was a residential care officer in a therapeutic community for adolescents and then a social worker for Looked After Children, before qualifying as a child and adolescent psychotherapist in the late 80s. She has a special interest in Looked After Children, Adoption and Complex Trauma. She continues to supervise trainees, as well as therapists working in schools; consults to social practitioners; and teaches at IPCAPA.