Successful Academic Achievement Among Foster Children: What Did the Foster Parents Do?

ABSTRACT

Children who spend part of their childhood in foster homes have, as a group, lower academic achievement than their peers. However, some of these children do well and succeed in higher education. Resilience is about positive development enhanced by protective factors despite adversity. Protective factors may be both positive qualities in the children themselves and their social contexts. The purpose of this article is to explore how young people who spent part of their childhood in foster care succeeded in higher education. We interviewed 13 foster parents and 16 young adults with ongoing or completed university studies. Two main themes emerged as particularly important: the young adults’ motivation and effort, and qualities in the foster home. In this article, we focus on the qualities in the foster home. The analysis showed three main themes related to the foster home that supported school achievement: the promotion of a feeling of belonging in the foster home; core values such as taking school work seriously and giving one’s best; and providing order and structure in the foster children’s lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Foster Home
• Academic Achievement
• Success
• Higher Education
• Child Welfare
• Child Protection
• Resilience
• Belonging

ORCiD

Dag Tore Skilbred http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7793-0431

Notes

1. The main results of this article were published in an article in a Norwegian journal for child protection workers (Skilbred & Iversen, 2014).