Parental involvement has become a cornerstone of the movement to promote permanency planning for children and youth wo are placed — or at risk of placement — out of teir homes. Foster family care in particular provides many opportunities for effective involvement of biological parents in child welfare practice. Following consideration of the rationale and purposes of parental involvement, this article focuses on implications and guidelines for promoting optimal participation of biological parents.

This paper is based on the latest findings of the Children's Bureau of Australia recently released study entitled Particular Care Reconsidered by Barbara Szwarc. The Study, being a follow-up to the 1979 Report by N.J. Smith and G. Gregory entitled Particular Care was based on an Australia wide survey conducted in June 1984 on all children living in Non-Government Childrens Homes and Foster Care. Particular concentration in the study has been given to children in disadvantageous positions.

Also referred to in this paper is another report by Barbara Swarcz on A Study Into The Victorian Children's Aid Society Respite Care Program During the 1985-86 Holiday Period. This report was based primarily on the perceptions of parents of the children who used the program.

Of particular concern in this paper is the amount of undue injustice and inequality that such children and their families suffer just because their children are disabled.

Child welfare agencies and workers are often so besieged by pressures from all sides that they may lose sight of their purposes. They may mistake their current programs for their reasons for being. Daily activities in agencies are frequently determined by crises in the lives of societally unintegrated children and youth. They may be called neglected and/or abused, disturbed and/or deliquent. What they tend to have in common, whatever label they are given, is that they are somehow peripheral to their society, undervalued by it, and often victimized. Is it any wonder that children and youth become alienated, feeling unbelonging and depressed? Or that there are high staff turnover, under-funding and organizational emergencies in agencies mandated to provide primarily remedial (after-the-pain) services? Under these circumstances, practitioners have little opportunity to review the assumptions, as well as the effects of their daily work.

For the child in residential care who, for whatever reason will not be returning to the natural family, long term foster placement is often seen as a means of providing a suitable alternative family environment. The formation of mutually satisfying emotional ties within a family setting is recognised as being an important ingredient is the healthy psychological development of a child. However, the high rate of foster placement breakdown attests to the fact that these ties are not easily formed.

In South Australia, at any one time, approximately 2,300 children are known to be living apart from their parents. Some 1,500 of these children are in foster care. A 1982 Department for Community Welfare survey of a 50% sample of children who had been in continuous foster care for more than three years revealed that, while 60%of the sample had experienced only one foster placement, 24% had experienced three or more foster placements. Figures are similar In the United States where analysis of eleven foster care studies revealed that some 23% of children had three or more placements. (Westman, 1979).

Most agencies that provide residential services for children and youth make some attempt to work with natural family members; e.g. mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, or brother of those placed within these programmes. Some common approaches to this include the employment of social workers or involvement of other social agencies to undertake this work. Alternatively, a member of the direct care staff in a residential programme may be designated as a family worker and required to make extra effort to maintain links between the child in the programme and the natural family. Under all of these arrangements, direct care practitioners in residential programmes are expected to be responsive to natural family members visiting a child in the programme. They are also expected to support a child planning to return home for a family visit or returning to the programme from such an event.

Child abuse constitutes a social problem whose dimensions we cannot yet quite grasp and whose causes are as multi-faceted as they are difficult to identify. Over the past two decades or so, ever since the re-awakening of interest in the topic, there has been an abundance of theorising and speculating about causes of child abuse. Theories which attempt to explain child abuse have ranged from the individual - psychological and specific deviant behaviour (like alcoholism and other types of addiction) - to socio-economic factors, faulty child-parent relationships, lack of family support resources and many more. Each of these theories, even if underdeveloped, has something to contribute to our understanding but none, by itself, has enabled us to say that if only we concentrate our resources on it we will be able to tackle child abuse at its very roots. What we have begun to learn is that we are dealing with a complex situation.

This paper aims firstly to describe the existing Melbourne Family Care Organisation (M.F.C.O.) Service Information System (S.I.S.) and how it was developed. Although the system was developed to meet our own needs, it has also from the outset been considered to be an innovative demonstration to the field with the hope that other welfare agencies will organise their own systematic data collections to allow for pooling of information and thereby facilitating advocacy, lobbying and social comment. A copy of the computer program, therefore, is available free of charge to any agencies who consider it may be appropriate for them. Secondly, M.F.C.O. would like to share some of their experiences in the hope that other agencies interested in undertaking development of their own systems, may be able to avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered.

The agency described here works with low-functioning excluded families. Members of these families often cannot perform ordinary family tasks, and one of the agency's aims is to assist development in these areas. This article reports an attempt to use some principles of adult learning theory with a group of women who meet regularly in a social/educational setting.

Child Protection and Family Support. These are two aspects of our work in family and children's services that have been much discussed over recent years. Can you protect a child whilst at the same time purport to support the family? Should the two functions be organisationally and structurally separated? Are they really just parts of the continuum of care and commitment which we all share in families and children? These and other similar questions have been frequently repeated during the first half of the 80's as we all searched for ways to meet the obvious deficiencies in the networks of families and children's services that had been established. But as we look to the remainder of the 80's there a number of critical issues which are well indentified but which we have yet to really come to grips with.