Maturation and Identity Development among Children and Youth in Out-Of-Home Care

The service that I am currently managing, the Looked After Children Service, which is part of the Foundation for Social Welfare Services, supports all children and youths residing in out of home care placements in Malta and sees that all their needs are being met. The service supports minors to gain stability, to explore their personal strengths, and to mature in a healthy way while making sense of their identity. Living in out of home care can be a traumatic experience and the need to make a sense of this experience is crucial in order to achieve greater stability in life (Kools, 1997; Mc Kinney, 2011).

From our experience, minors who live in out of home care try to build their identity and make sense of their stories in different ways. While some feel safe to discuss this issue with their primary carers or social workers, others might need more support in this process. Our aim is to make sure that minors deal with their life story with the aim that they start to make sense of their past and present, while they also start to reflect about their possible future (Mc Lean, 2005). As a service we try to help minors get hold of pictures or other mementos from their past, as this helps them in the process of building their own identity.

This topic was always of interest to me and while reading my Master Degree in Family Therapy and Systemic Practice, I focused my dissertation on this area of studies. My study was aimed to understand better how fostered adolescents form their identity while belonging in two different systems; the foster family and their biological family. The results of my study show the importance that minors are supported while they are making sense of their experience of living in out of home care. Professionals and their main carers have to be equipped to help them answer their questions as in their quest to build their own stories minors might find ambiguity. For some participants contact with the biological family also featured as an important step in the process of building their own identity.

While carrying out my study I had the opportunity to interview youths living in out of home care and look into the notion of how they mature and build their identity. I believe that the experience of carrying out my study and the results that emerged from it would be beneficial to share with other professionals and colleagues.

References:

Kools, S.M. (1997). Adolescent identity development in foster care. Family Relations, 46 (3), 263-271.

Mc Kinney, J.S. (2011). The situated self and the negotiation of a “bad” identity in therapeutic foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 33, 1217 – 1223.

Mc Lean, K.C. (2005). Late adolescent identity development: Narrative meaning making and memory telling. Developmental Psychology, 41 (4), 683 – 691.

Mifsud, M. (2016). The experience of fostered adolescents who have contact with their biological families. (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Malta.