My study will focus on how the lack of social support from foster parents and social workers affects a child’s long-term growth. My study will use a developmental theory, Jeffery Arnett’s emerging adulthood theory. Arnett (2011) points out the need for a new psychosocial stage in Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development due to recent trends that were discovered of people between the ages of 18 and 25. Erikson’s theory “focuses on how personalities evolve throughout life as a result of the interaction between biologically based maturation and the demands of society” (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, p. 313).
Erickson believed that people face crises (psychic demands) at each developmental stage in their lives which forces them to learn how to adjust to stress. According to Erikson’s theory, the stage of adolescence includes the task of identity versus part perplexity which then advances directly to the stage of young adulthood where a person’s task revolves around intimacy versus isolation (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2013). Although, Arnett (2004) has found that people between the ages of 18 and 25 do not just distinguish their developmental phase as having particular features, but they recognize extraordinary psychosocial tasks: autonomy and self-reliance.
During this developmental stage, a lack of uncertainty and vulnerability occurs, Arnett’s emerging adulthood theory highlights the need for support for people to succeed. Even though Arnett’s argument focused on the general population, it can still be applied to similarly aged youth in the foster care system. Nonetheless, the need for support is more noteworthy when talking about foster children because of the way they frequently lack the same connections the general population has, and in some ways lack the ability to those connections.
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Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman (2013) stated, “The task of becoming independent involves attaining emotional, social, and economic independence” (P. 356). An individual’s emotional independence requires the end of emotional dependence on parents while maintaining a relationship with them. Social freedom requires that an individual become “self-directed rather than other-directed”, stressing the need to make one’s own decisions (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2013, p. 356). Arnett’s theoretical perspective supports that emancipated foster youth need support as they go through these different stages because premature independence from the system leads to adverse outcomes in child development.
For foster youth growing up in the system, people are not there for you socially and emotionally (Zastrow & Kirst-Ashman, 2013, p. 344). Foster parents do not take the time to understand, the hardships that foster youth are going through; they assume a child is misbehaving because they are in the system. Children are being shifted home to home without an explanation as to why their last foster family did not want them. Social workers need to provide foster youth with social support at this difficult stage of their life.
References
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29714910
- https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-63172-001
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221214471400056X
- http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jtF2AmrqvknKPHAAt3mp/full
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hape20/current
- https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1009325
- http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0893863010376940
