What happens when a child or young person in care is described as having “nobody”?

For Kevin Campbell, that question became the starting point for research that would ultimately challenge some deeply established assumptions within child welfare.

In this episode of Care Visions Professional Talk, Humphrey Hawksley speaks with Kevin Campbell of Pale Blue and Family Finding about family connection, kinship care, child development and what happens when children become separated from the relationships around which their lives have developed.

Kevin explains that the origins of Family Finding go back around two decades, when he and colleagues began looking at some of the longest-waiting young people within out-of-home care systems in the United States.

They wanted to test a fundamental claim: did these young people genuinely have nobody?

Kevin describes research involving around 50,000 young people across the United States and British Columbia. For young people who had often been characterised as having no family available to them, the research found approximately 100–300 living adult relatives on average.

From those networks, Kevin says an average of five to eight adults came forward wanting a lifelong relationship with the young person — producing a rate of 94%.

That result changed the direction of his work.

The conversation goes much further than the practical process of locating relatives.

Humphrey asks Kevin what family connection actually means and why biological and pre-existing relationships can be so important to children.

Kevin discusses emerging understanding from neuroscience, genomics and biological science and argues that the connection between a child and the people around whom they have developed cannot simply be understood as a social preference.

Even where separation takes place for legitimate reasons, he argues, separation itself has consequences.

Kevin reflects on his own experience as a foster parent to teenagers and how research into the outcomes of young people leaving care forced him to question some of the assumptions on which care systems had been built.

The conversation also looks at the often-repeated idea that a child needs only one stable adult.

Kevin agrees that the evidence supporting the importance of a consistent adult relationship is powerful, but argues that another question now needs to be considered: who is that adult?

Children do not develop independently of parents, family, culture and community. Their relationships are part of the environment in which their brains, bodies and regulatory systems develop.

This leads into a wider discussion about family separation.

Kevin draws on the history of the Red Cross and international family tracing following war, disaster and civil unrest. He discusses the international recognition of families' right to know the fate of separated relatives and asks what lessons that history might hold for modern child welfare systems.

The distinction becomes particularly important when considering children.

Unlike adults, children are still developing.

Kevin describes children's extraordinary ability to adapt to their environments as a human “superpower”. But those adaptations can also reflect the adversity, uncertainty and disruption they experience.

The discussion examines what happens when early adversity is followed by removal from family, placement instability, changing caregivers and broken relationships.

Kevin describes this as “compositional adversity”: different experiences accumulating and interacting across childhood rather than adversity being treated as a single isolated event.

This has significant implications for how behaviour is understood.

Instead of seeing a young person's behaviour simply as a psychiatric or psychological problem requiring treatment, Kevin argues that professionals should also consider the adaptations the young person has made in order to survive what has happened to them.

If children can adapt in response to adversity, they also retain the capacity to adapt to new experiences.

For Kevin, that makes the environment of relationships and support surrounding a child critically important.

The conversation also considers whether systems are beginning to change.

Kevin points to Los Angeles County as a major example. He describes a system that had around 60,000 children in care in the early 1990s and says that figure is now below 12,000.

He explains how dedicated family-engagement workers have been introduced alongside social workers, creating additional capacity specifically to find, engage and build relationships with family and other people already connected to a child.

Kevin says some Los Angeles offices now average around 80% kinship placements, including extended relatives, non-offending parents and people who already had a meaningful relationship with the child.

He then discusses efforts to replicate Family Finding approaches internationally, including work in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

Kevin says he has been involved in Britain for more than a decade, particularly through work in North Yorkshire and the City of York, and believes there is now a stronger national conversation around kinship than there has been previously.

Danny Henderson then joins Humphrey and Kevin to explore what these arguments mean for residential and institutional care.

Their discussion considers treatment programmes, behavioural interventions, trauma, adversity and whether institutions can provide the kind of relationships and environments children require.

Kevin is careful to distinguish between the quality of individual organisations and the wider question of what children biologically and developmentally need.

He argues that there are organisations working extremely hard to provide the best care possible within residential settings, while also questioning whether institutional structures themselves can fully replicate the relationships required for healthy development.

This leads Kevin to suggest that child welfare should increasingly be viewed through a health lens as well as a child-protection lens.

If stable human relationships are fundamental to long-term health and development, then the consequences of disrupting those relationships extend far beyond the immediate question of where a child lives.

Despite the challenging subject matter, Kevin ends on an optimistic note.

He argues that there has never been a more hopeful time to improve these systems because our understanding of human development, relationships, health and adversity is greater than it has ever been.

The problem, he suggests, is no longer simply a lack of knowledge.

The challenge is closing the gap between what we know and what we do.

Featuring Kevin Campbell with Humphrey Hawksley and Danny Henderson on Care Visions Professional Talk.

You can download:  A Practice Brief For Child Welfare And Children’s Mental Health Practitioners. 'The Reform You Have Been Waiting Your Whole Career for Isn’t Coming. Ten Concepts from Science to Reform Your Practice Instead'.

https://carevisions.uksouth01.umbraco.io/media/gpwlb523/the-reform-isnt-coming_pale-blue-working-paper_final-version-for-publication.pdf

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