Quality of life and attachment representations of children taken into children’s homes in the framework of a child protection measure
Type de matériel :
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Improving children’s wellbeing is a major public policy concern. In child protection, this question has received growing attention in recent years. However, in the literature, there is no universally accepted definition or unique method of measuring wellbeing. In the health sector, however, the improvement of the wellbeing of patients has given rise to a great deal of work relating to the measurement of quality of life. Thus, this article focuses on the relationships between quality of life and quality of attachment representations among children in child protection institutions. It presents the results of a study carried out on forty children (twenty-eight boys and twelve girls) aged between four and ten years old entrusted to the French Aide sociale à l’enfance (ASE) service and living in an emergency children’s home. The average age of the children was six years and nine months. Their quality of life was measured using two assessment tools. One of these was completed by the children themselves (Manificat and Dazord, 1997) and the other by their social workers (Ravens-Sieberer and Bullinger, 1998). Attachment representations were explored using a French adaptation of the Attachment Story Completion Task created by Bretherton et al. (1990), and the coding system developed by the Lausanne team (Miljkovitch, et al., 2003). The results show links between attachment representations and the general quality of life evaluated by the children themselves or by social workers. Implications for practice will be discussed, emphasizing the conditions necessary to support children’s adaptation to their new living space in order to seek to maximize their wellbeing.
Réseaux sociaux