Extended Family Model of Foster Care Shows Benefits

A report from Australia looks at the benefits of the Mockingbird model of foster care, first pioneered in the U.S.  The model creates a collected group of foster homes, called a “constellation,” centered around a “hub home” of an experienced and licensed foster parent to provide encouragement, advice, and practical care.  

The model provides support to foster families that the traditional model can't offer. As one Australian hub parent recounted, a foster parent in the constellation suffered a medical emergency.  The hub parent, being an already licensed home, was able to care for the foster child for a few nights:

[I]t's the sort of thing that departments can't do, they just don't have the capacity as it was on a weekend.  “In a normal family, you would ring aunt so-and-so or a great friend to help out.”  Ms Critchley says Mockingbird does not have the "constraints" of DCP and can support carers outside the Monday to Friday work week.

The constellation model also provides an unusual kind of support for the foster kids in care:

The researcher said she was at the launch of a new constellation and remembered seeing the children running around and handing out birthday party invitations.  "The carers were telling me the children in their care had never been to a birthday party," she said. "They often send invitations out to other children at school, and no one comes, or they don't get invited to other children's birthday parties.  For the first time, these children were experiencing handing out invitations and having other children come to their birthday party."

There's not a lot of research yet about the benefits of this model, but the researcher cited in the article followed constellations in Adelaide for two years.  She found the model improved family retention, allowed siblings to be placed within the same family or constellation, and reduced carer dependence on the licensing agency.  Those benefits seem logical, and hopefully will show up in other studies.  Certainly, any program that builds support and relationships among foster parents and foster children is one that we should pay attention to and perhaps adopt far and wide.