Socioemotional characteristics of minors in foster care: A comparison between the estimation of parents, teachers and children

During the child's first few years, it's of fundamental importance the presence of a strong emotional base as long as it creates the possibility to open themselves to physical and social world with confidence, and as it acts as a facilitator of cognitive development. For this reason, if the family cannot ensure such base, social services are forced to resort to foster care, a resource that has a lot of difficulties, leading to different implications in the development of the child and of the foster family. It is therefore important to analyze in depth the socio-emotional variables that characterize children who are in a situation of foster care in order to provide adequate assistance to optimize their development. For this 32 minors in foster care, 31 foster parents and 28 teachers from the city of Valencia, were administered the BASC. The results highlight that parents are evaluating children, in general, worse than tutors. Specifically they consider children more aggressive, they detect more behavioral and attention problems and recognize in them a greater tendency to externalize the problems, while the teachers consider these children as with more social and adaptive skills. There were no significant differences between the scores of parents, teachers and children. High levels of psychopathology (which are clinically significant in various cases) and the fact that host parents evaluate minors as more problematic, are indicators of parents' and minors' need of support from public organizations.

► Socio-emotional variables in foster care children are analyzed.
► Parents evaluate foster children's psychopathology worse than teachers.
► Parents evaluate foster children with more behavioral and attention problems.
► Teachers recognize more social skills in foster care children.
► Parents and minors need support from public organizations.