Making sense of family: a story completion study of birth children of foster carers

Birth children of foster carers are active participants in the foster family unit, and yet their contributions, outcomes, and potential have been consistently neglected in research and policy. Research suggests that birth children within a fostering family provide significant resources and can be hugely influential in the success of a placement. This study explores, through story completion, how birth children of foster carers make sense of being in a foster family. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted on 34 story completion texts from 17 UK-based birth children of foster carers, aged 8-49 years. Three themes were identified: costs, family identity, and empathy. These themes refine the key markers of birth children's experience identified in existing literature and highlight the strategies employed to make sense of their experience. These findings further the discussion that birth children of foster carers should be more widely recognised for their role in the foster family unit, better supported through it, and more officially involved in the decisions and processes of fostering. Existing research and the current study suggest that doing so may help prevent placement breakdown as well as aiding in the recruitment of potential foster carers.