Session: Mothers’ Experience of Custody Loss: Emerging Research and Implications for Practice (Research that Promotes Sustainability and (re)Builds Strengths (January 15 - 18, 2009))

U. S. child welfare policy emphasizes the prevention of out-of-home placement of abused or neglected children (P. L. 96-272) and, for those placed, the timely return of children to families in which they will be healthy and safe (P. L. 105-89). Within this policy context, therefore, reunification of children with their biological parents is an important objective. In fact, of the foster children with established case plan goals, about half are expected to return home (Children's Bureau, 2003). However, investigations of reunification rates for specific populations, communities, and periods of time show lower rates of reunification, with some counties showing reunification rates of less than 25% within children's first year of placement (cf., Wells & Guo, 2006). Approximately one third of reunified children reenter care (Miller, Fisher, Fetrow & Jordan, 2005). Stable reunification of children with their biological parents, most commonly economically-impoverished single mothers, is an uncommon outcome of out-of-home-care placement. Knowledge of reunification depends on administrative data-based studies in which demographic and service-system factors, factors such as child ethnicity or reason for placement (Wells & Guo, 1999; Shaw, 2006), are linked to speed of reunification. This information is useful to the identification of subgroups of families at risk of failure to reunify, but less so to the development of clinical practices or programs that would assist the population. Moreover, existing services for parents with children in out-of-home care such as parent education classes and visitation, family-centered practice, and intensive family reunification services (Pine, Spath, & Gosteli, 2005) tend to be under-theorized; or, they remain untested. Current rates of reunification and re-entry of foster children suggest (but do not prove) that existing programs may be relatively ineffective. In light of the importance of the reunification objective, the relatively low percentages of children who are reunified, and the state of current reunification practice, it is critical to understand the experiences of parents with children in out-of-home care in order to develop a better understanding than we have at present of the processes through which parents move, over time, toward or away from the reunification goal. One central aspect of this process is mothers' experience of custody loss (Kielty, 2006). A systematic search of existing databases (Petticrew & Roberts, 2006) revealed only one investigation of the experience of custody loss for mothers with children in foster care (Marcenko & Striepe, 1997). Investigators' identified themes such as “help from others” that characterized mothers' reports of what helped them to reunify. This symposium begins to fill this gap in knowledge by providing reports of two qualitative investigations of abusive or neglectful mothers' experiences with custody loss and one that examines their implications for practice. Through these three linked presentations, therefore, we aim to highlight emerging research that holds the potential to inform development of social work practices that respond therapeutically to mothers' experiences and to help them to “rebuild” and to “sustain” their families, in recognition of the conference theme.