Why Are Children In Local Authority Care?

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• Why Are Children in Local Authority Care?

There are many reasons why children aren’t able to live at home but it is nearly always because their birth parents are unable to look after them. Birth parents may have an addiction to drugs or alcohol or have mental health problems and the child may have been neglected or abused. Sometimes there will have been some kind of crisis or disruption within the family, such as a long term illness, death or imprisonment. These kind of things happen in families of all social and cultural backgrounds.

Less commonly these days we have babies to find homes for as a result of an unplanned pregnancy. In these cases, the baby is fostered until an adoptive family is found.

In Kingston we also take in a number of children each year who arrive alone from abroad and seek asylum in the borough. Often they have escaped from intolerable circumstances in their own country where they may have lost parents or other close relatives.