Foster and Adoptive Parenting

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Session 1

Unit Five: Why Children Come Into Care

Family Stressors

Family Stressors

Everyone experiences stress, however, families involved with child protective services often have more extraordinary stress, fewer coping skills and less access to resources than families who do not abuse or neglect their children. Foster and adoptive parents may find empathy for birth parents when they realize that birth parents don’t necessarily intend to harm their children, but at times can be overcome by stress and not know where to turn for help.

Here are some questions for you to consider:

What causes you stress?
How do you cope with stress?
What/who do you have for supports and resources?
If your stress level became dangerously high what would you do?

Child abuse and neglect happens at all social and economic levels. Experts may not always agree on why child abuse and neglect happens, but they do agree that there is no one single explanation. We all have stressors in our lives. The diagram below tries to capture the concept of how stressors can impact the family from all sides, possibly resulting in abuse:

Situational stress - e.g. birth or death of a family member
Day to day stress - e.g. crying child
Extraordinary stress - e.g. domestic abuse

Stress graphic: Situational, day to day, extraordinary, absence of resources all adding up to potential for child maltreatment

At any given time, anyone can become overwhelmed when too many stressors impact him or her all at once. Yet, not all people under stress abuse others. Oftentimes, the key to coping with stress is the resources we have in our lives and our understanding of how to use them.

Our willingness to be vulnerable with others and to ask for help is also very important. Plus, having an understanding of how to utilize the resources in our community is not always as easy as it may seem.

In the upcoming sessions, we will be taking a closer look at the dynamics of abuse and neglect as well as ways to support and interact with children and parents.

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