The lived experience and support needs of kinship carers in maintaining contact with birth parents: Informing practice for birth family contact

This study is contemporary with the current development in Australia of kinship care as the rapidly growing preferred option in Out of Home Care (OoHC). Kinship care and birth family contact have been studied in previous research and further work is required to investigate and address the contested value and complexity of contact and the future implications for improved outcomes.This qualitative study examines the lived experiences and support needs of kinship carers in maintaining family contact. Semi-structured interviews with seven carers and fourteen case managers from an OoHC service across three sites were conducted to elicit their experiences and perspectives of family contact in kinship care. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is used to understand and make sense of the findings.Findings indicate that grief, loss, and complex emotions were keenly felt by participants in kinship care, in the midst of past and ongoing trauma following events leading up to the child’s removal from the birth family. Kinship carers valued the experience of family connection through contact, but the findings revealed a more nuanced picture where both positive and negative experiences co-exist for many participants. Healing from trauma and making positive memories for future family life was experienced but so was conflict between the birth family and carers. Carers also found contact to be challenging due to intense emotions and concerns about safety during contact. Carer experience is that support is imperative for contact but decision making about contact is contentious, with fraught and limited communication with support services. First Nations carers reflected that contact enabled the maintenance of family and cultural connections but was affected by intergenerational trauma, failure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle and systemic failings that led to First Nations children and families being over-represented across all indicators of Out of Home Care.Implications are to promote relational interventions and trauma-informed practice to enable contact in kinship care to be the means to positive family connection. Implementing data collection on the many aspects of kinship care, for example, the age of children and the type of kin, will assist in targeting future research to maximise the benefits of contact for children, carers and birth families. This study illustrates that listening to the voices of kinship carers in practice development and future research and building of partnerships with birth families will enhance effective and trauma-informed birth family contact.