The Relationship of a Foster Child and the Social Worker

The relationship between a social worker and the children they represent in the foster care system evolves many different emotional connections. Social workers provide counseling and direction to people in crisis. Their clients may vary from the young and older unemployed to young children who are in need of foster homes right on down to the elderly people who have no one to care for them to provide for them or even someone to love them. They try to better the clients by helping them obtain government funds, education, and other treatments if needed. Social workers have many techniques for solving problems. Casework requires meetings with individuals and families. They may counsel young people whose parents have died or families who have lost all their possessions in floods or other disasters. Group work brings together people who have problems in common, such as mothers who are not married. Social workers help them solve those problems through deep conversation and well-planned activities. Community organization work usually has specific goals such as finding jobs for idle high school students and so on. In supporting my thesis I plan to highlight different situations that bring about many different emotions from both the child and the social worker. The reason that so many foster children feel the need to fight for power and control stems from what is for all intents and purposes their trying to live for or through others. The lack of known self drives the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others that blur the boundaries between where a known self would end and others begin. Without personal boundaries the foster children often end up feeling helpless when they relate to others because essentially they aspect everything about how they feel and what they think is taking place in others. The power and control relationships a foster child and a social worker share are self explanatory. The child has been beaten badly by his or her mother. It is in the social workers power to go and remove this child from this abusive situation. This then shows the child that this person is now in control of my life, they are the ones who will save me from being harmed ever again by my mother or anyone else for that matter. Showing the child you as the social worker have the power and the control will allow the child to be able to call you and tell you if anything else may happen in their new foster home or even back at home.