Developmental needs in institutional settings: How children experience and imagine better residential youth care

This paper investigates how minors in Flemish youth in out-of-family placement experience care, and how they think the out-of-family care system could be improved. Based on this, recommendations were gathered for both front-end staff and youth care policy makers. Semi-structured in depth-interviews were conducted with sixteen looked-after minors, between the ages of 10 and 17, residing in nine different residential care facilities in Flanders (Belgium). Results show that the first move away from home – sometimes a removal by the police – is frightening and confusing, and children feel they receive very little information before or during this event. Subsequent placement moves are usually involuntarily and often entail the loss of relations and familiar surroundings. Nevertheless, some moves are welcome. For example, moves towards a setting closer to family, or towards a setting more in line with one’s developmental age. The recommendations children and teenagers made were often very concrete and focused on their daily living situations (e.g., home-like living environments, responsive professional care providers, higher allowance, better food). Furthermore, the participants’ requests are often linked to the developmental tasks they are confronted with (e.g., navigating autonomy, freedom, privacy, social relations and peers). We therefore strongly encourage welfare and other out-of-family care providers to take a developmental psychology perspective in the care they provide, and to be mindful of the small, very concrete aspects of living in residential care that strongly matter to children and youth.