Ambiguous Loss In Foster Care Essay

All Children in foster care experience loss. Even when placed in the very best of foster care placements . (Berrier, 2001) Children in foster care are faced with a different kind of loss than most would expect. When children are removed from the only home, the only life they have ever known, no matter what the conditions are they experience grief and loss. This grief is identified as Ambiguous loss, a loss that occurs without closure or understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief (Google ). Even when the plan is reunification, and there is a good possibility that they will be returned home, children still experience profound

Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by a change or end in a familiar pattern of behavior, “wrote John James and Russell Friedman in When Children Grieve.” Friedman says that just the phrase “foster child” implies several losses. The pervasive presence of ambiguous loss in foster children illustrates that many behavioral indicators of cognitive and emotional discomfort in foster children are normative (Lee and Whiting, 2007). For children in foster care, this type of loss tends to happen over and over again, and is incredibly hard to process, which is what this paper will focus

Adoptalk further identifies that it is hard to resolve grief when one does not know if the loss is temporary or permanent. Society recognizes death through funeral ceremonies, but there is no somber equivalent to observe losses caused by separation for the birth