A tangled web: Parental contact with children in kinship care

Abstract

Contact between parents and children in care is a contested area. Parental contact is recognized to be important, yet may present protective issues; in the kinship care environment, it brings the particular challenges of complex family relationships. Seeking the parents' perspective in a child protection context is difficult and therefore under-researched. This paper describes a nested study within an Australian research project on family contact in kinship care in which the perspectives of 18 mothers and 2 fathers were sought via in-depth interviews. Mothers and fathers described strong feelings of disempowerment in the context both of their family and the child protection system. The relat..