The Least Detrimental Alternative: A Systematic Guide to Case Planning and Decision Making for Children in Care

Martine Miljkovitch is an associate professor of Psychology at
Laurentian University.

This volume addresses many aspects of dealing with children in care,
especially foster care and adoption. Attachment theory has been chosen,
a fitting basis for a work about this population. The author tries to
rehabilitate the principle of foster care and gives guidelines to
prevent foster-care breakdowns; these breakdowns have been linked to
several psychopathological conditions in children, particularly
delinquency. Steinhauer defends the thesis that “adoption is viewed,
at times naively, as generically better (that is, as a consistently more
permanent and better placement) than foster care.” He advocates
“planned permanent foster care” and sees “multiple attachments”
(to the natural foster families) as advantageous for these children.

Continuation of contacts between biological family and child is to be
promoted. To cater to the needs of the more disturbed wards who come
into care today, “four innovative models of foster care [are]
described and compared.” These models are basically variations on
coupling of therapeutic fostering with self-help support and supervision
groups for foster parents.

Of course, there are some weaknesses—for instance, in the excessive
use of some fashionable ideas (e.g., the seductiveness of sexually
abused children; the need to repeat the past in child victims to control
it). More importantly, the book may be too long. Compensating for these
weaknesses are many good points, such as the author’s open-minded and
fair view of professions other than his, a varied use of the masculine
and the feminine, and good additional chapters on special topics (such
as assessing for parenting capacity, or children’s testimony in
sexual-abuse cases). This is a thorough, interesting, compassionate, and
well-documented book on a topic of great importance by a veteran
clinician in the field, who notes that “if one takes into account the
long-term costs of not providing such a model [to pay foster parents a
salary], such economy is likely in the long run to prove false
indeed.”