In the best interest of the children
All children need families who are willing to give them a new home, will meet their needs and provide them with a loving and secure environment. It is also important that their family matches their ethnic and cultural descent as closely as possible, whether they are white, black, Asian or of mixed heritage.
As becomes only too apparent when reading any issue of Be My Parent, children of black or minority ethnic parentage, including those of mixed heritage, are over-represented in the care system in the UK. People of black and minority ethnic descent make up nearly 8 per cent of the total UK population (2001 Census), yet children like these represent over 30 per cent of the children featured in Be My Parent. These children often have to wait the longest for a new adoptive or permanent foster family.
Finding the ‘right’ family for any looked after child is always complex and sensitive, and even more so for black children or those coming from a minority ethnic background. The contributions of the families in the articles you are about to read in this issue of Be My Parent, are testimony to this.
Like most looked after children, black and minority ethnic children may have had a difficult start to life, and need a stable, safe and loving environment to grow up in. Their new family should meet their individual needs in the areas of health, education, emotional and behavioural development. It is also important – and this is a legal requirement – that their carers help them develop a sense of their identity. Ideally this should happen within their home on a daily basis.
When placing children with permanent families, adoption and fostering agencies are required to give consideration to the religious persuasion, ‘racial’ origin, and cultural and linguistic background of all children.
Ethnicity and racism
For black and minority ethnic children, their ethnic descent is very significant, as it is linked with issues of racism, identity and self-esteem, as well as with culture, religion and language. Black and minority ethnic children need to be protected from, as well as prepared for, the various forms of racism and discrimination they are likely to encounter in their lives. Some of the children in will have already experienced racism in their early lives in their birth families and communities, including name calling and rejection. It is therefore important that these children have the opportunity to grow up in an environment where they are protected from this, particularly in their homes and immediate environment, and where any racism they may receive is openly acknowledged and suitably responded to by their carers, teachers and others. Children need to be helped to recognise that they are not alone in experiencing or challenging racism, and to know that their permanent family has also experienced, survived or challenged racism.
Identity and self-esteem
Developing their own identity is particularly difficult for children who have been adopted or are permanently fostered, as, when leaving their birth family, they will have experienced a huge loss of their past and their heritage. This is why support such as life story work and maintaining some contact with their birth family can be so valuable for them. Identity incorporates many different aspects: age, gender, ethnicity, neighbourhood, interests, skills, religion and culture.
To help develop their self-esteem and a sense of their identity, children need to receive continuous and positive messages from their carers about all aspects of their identity, including ethnicity and ‘race’, culture, religion and language. Children will benefit from having positive role models from their carers, but also in their neighbourhoods, schools and places of worship.
The ‘right’ family for black children
Up until the 1970s, it was common practice to place black children with white carers, and there was little recognition of the impact this might have on the child’s identity while growing up, and in later life. Nowadays, gaps in ethnic and cultural identity are more widely recognised in terms of what many white families can offer a black child. This includes a lack of shared experience in racism, and limitations in providing positive black role models the children can attach to.
There are therefore many reasons why black children should be ideally placed with a black family which reflects his or her ethnicity: that family is more likely to provide the child with positive role models (who the child can also attach to), an environment where the child is ‘normal’ rather than ‘exceptional’, as well as support with how to cope with racism.
If the family is of similar culture, religion, language and class to the child being placed with them, they can also provide continuity with some aspects of the child’s heritage, and access to aspects of the culture they have, or would have, been brought up with in their birth family.
However, all families have their own ‘culture’ or individual way of honouring or developing their culture and heritage, and it is unlikely that a child’s new permanent family will do this in the same way as their birth family did. As an adopter, previously interviewed in Be My Parent explained: “It’s not because I’m black that a black child will fit in with my family.”
Children of mixed heritage
When looking for a family for children of mixed ethnicity, it is essential to meet the wishes of the child and their birth parents, and to continue positive aspects of the child’s life, for example, cultural perspectives, and a sense of belonging.
Ideally, children of mixed heritage need to be placed in a family and environment where they can positively develop those parts of their heritage which are least prevalent in society, such as being black, Muslim, Irish, or Jewish. In that way they can be better equipped to cope with the disadvantage and discrimination they are likely to meet throughout life.
At the same time as being encouraged to value these parts of their heritage, the child should still have access to other parts of his or her identities – although this is likely to be less of an issue if these are more prevalent in society, for instance if part of their descent is white English.
Generally, black families are more likely (than white families) to have access to a wide range of cultures because they will usually have experience of living in multicultural areas within Britain and, for some families, if coming from multicultural communities abroad.
To reflect or actively develop…
The negative effects of placing a child in a family which doesn’t reflect his or her own ethnicity can sometimes be difficult to recognise. The child may develop close attachments to their carers and have high self-esteem in some aspects of their identity (for example, they may be high academic achievers at school or be successful in their professional lives), but may feel alienated from their new family at the same time, and have low self-esteem around their ethnic and racial origin. This underdeveloped sense of identity can have lifetime implications for them, even when they have left the adoptive home.
Where it is not possible for a child to be placed in a family that reflects their ethnicity, some of the negative effects on the child’s identity can be lessened if the child’s adoptive or foster family can actively develop the child’s culture and ethnicity. This will involve finding in their support network and their neighbourhood – or sometimes further afield – people, places or other ways of providing an ongoing link and contact with the culture, ethnicity, language or religion of the child’s birth family, so that they can develop this side of their identity.
Originally published in the Be My Parent newspaper in March 2006.
This article is published with the kind permission of the people involved. You may download it for your own reference but if you wish to use it for any other purpose, please contact Be My Parent for authorisation: Be My Parent, BAAF, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Telephone: 020 7421 2666/5/4.
Last updated: 10 September 07
