CRECER EN FAMILIA: LA PERMANENCIA EN ACOGIMIENTO FAMILIAR

Foster care offers a life environment to the child withdrawal fromhis biological family, during an undefined time period that can be prolonged, in the limit, until adulthood or independence.Astable family environment allows the development of security and belonging feelings associated to the possibility of maintaining the contacts with his biological family. In most of the situations, child can and must remain with his foster parents, and the acknowledgement of this parent role is a step that can contribute to avoid ambiguities and uncertainties that are prejudicial to the systemand for the practices that itwill be configuring.Nevertheless, in Portugal, foster care is a temporary charactermeasure,whose application depends on the predictability of the return of the child or young person to the family of origin. The purpose of this article is to, after a brief characterization of the Portuguese children and youth protection system, analyze the foster care permanence between 2006 and 2011, based on the characterization report of the situation of foster children and youth. Following is presented and discuss, the collected data from a study developed in Porto district, including 289 foster children in May 2011, representing 52% of all children in Portuguese foster care system. The results were achieved using a data acquisition form filled with official information of each foster child, and 52 interviews with carers. Among the principal results is to highlight the long lasting placements, the permanence of the child with his first foster care family, and the global positive evaluation of the achieved results, thus we can identify several challenges to the near future of the Portuguese foster care.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio