Why might a care worker support a young person in looking back through their life? How best might they go about this, and what skills and sensitivities would they need to employ?

Essay by ayesha1978University, Bachelor'sA, June 2009

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Children who grow up in the families they born into, usually have time and opportunities to learn about there own past and form their identities. However children that have been separated from their families of origin, face a real challenge when it comes to finding out about their birth families and their past.

When children loose track of there past they find it difficult to relate to the present and loose hope in the future.

Life story work is an effort to give back a past to children that have been separated from their families.

Gathering information and facts can help a child to accept his/her past and put hopes in the future with the new found knowledge.

People working with children that have been separated from their birth families, find that life story work can help a child to talk through about changes, separation, losses and to remember the good things they have experienced too.

Life storybook can result in a video, an audiotape, a pc file, or a book.

Anyone can benefit from life story work as it enables a structure for talking, not just to children but to adults too.

Life story work can carefully be adapted to be used with children, elderly and also parents from whom children are separated. Many parents that have been separated from their children have been in the care system themselves.

In Unit 5 (Unit 5, pp.20-21), we read the story of Jordan, his foster carer Bill and the care worker Suzanne Mcgladdery and Afshan Ahmad who work for Foster Care Associates.

Jordan has had difficult relationships in his life and up till he started his life storybook, he was given a rather negative impression of his father. Jordan was given lots of different stories and understanding what should be the...