Mirror families: Creating extended families for life

Foster care is in crisis in most western countries, including Australia. Increasing numbers of children are being placed in out-of-home care at a younger age due to arange of issues, including parental substance abuse.

Mirror Families is an early intervention model which seeks to address the underlying causes of the foster care crisis. It supports positive, lifelong outcomes for vulnerable children and young people who are at risk of being placed outside their birth families or who are already in kinship, foster and permanent care.

This paper focuses on how a ‘village’, or extended family, can be created for each child so that lifelong (and beyond) supportive relationships can be established and nurtured. The key question which informs the model is: ‘Who will be therefor the grandchildren?’