When the Parent Was in Care Too: Intergenerational Experience and What It Asks of Practice

Research consistently finds that between a quarter and a third of looked-after children have at least one parent who was themselves looked after at some point in childhood. The figure varies depending on methodology and the population studied, but the pattern is stable enough to be treated not as an anomaly but as a baseline feature of the residential childcare landscape. Most children's homes will, over the course of a year, look after children whose parents have been through the same system — sometimes the same borough, sometimes even some of the same placements. This is not incidental background information. It is clinically and relationally significant. And it is, in most homes, either unknown or known and not acted upon in any systematic way. Records that document a young person's history will often note the parent's care background in a line, if at all, without the workforce being supported to understand what it means for how they approach the child, the family, and the relationship between them. The gap between knowing and understanding is where much of the work that should happen in response to intergenerational care experience simply does not happen at all.

Family contact, understood through this lens, looks different. When a parent who visits their child in a residential home was themselves a looked-after child, the visit carries layers that a one-dimensional reading of "parental engagement" will miss. The parent may have their own unresolved history with the care system — anger at being removed, grief for what they lost, the long aftermath of a care experience that was itself inadequate or harmful — and that history does not disappear in the visiting room. It shapes how the parent presents: the lateness, the emotional volatility, the tendency to undermine the placement or compete with staff, the difficulty maintaining boundaries in the relationship with their child. These behaviours are frequently read as lack of commitment or poor parenting, and sometimes they are. But sometimes they are the expression of an adult whose own emotional development was disrupted by the same system their child is now inside, who has not received the therapeutic support their own care history warranted, and who experiences their child's placement as a repetition of something done to them. A residential worker who does not know this, or who knows it but has not been supported to think about it, will respond to the behaviour without understanding it. That is the difference between managing contact and genuinely supporting it — and the young people who bear the cost of the distinction are the ones for whom contact is already complicated enough.

Life story work, in the context of intergenerational care, requires something that standard frameworks do not always make explicit: that the child's story and the parent's story are not separable. A young person doing life story work who reaches the chapter about why they came into care will, if the parent was also in care, be touching a story that does not begin with them. It begins a generation earlier, with what happened to their parent in childhood, with what their parent was never given, with the way that experiences of harm replicate across generations when adequate support is not provided. This is not a comfortable story to tell. But a life story that omits it produces a young person with an incomplete and potentially distorted account of their own history — one that locates the problem of their family in their parent's individual failings rather than in the accumulation of circumstances, disadvantage, and institutional failure that produced those failings. The question that care-experienced young people often carry in silence — "am I going to end up like them?" — is one that life story work must address directly and honestly rather than avoiding. Directly means acknowledging what is known about cycles of care and what breaks them. Honestly means neither catastrophising the risk nor dismissing it with false reassurance. A young person who understands that their parent's struggles had roots, and that those roots do not predetermine their own trajectory, is a young person who has been given something genuinely useful. That requires practitioners who are themselves clear about intergenerational dynamics and who have been given the supervisory space to think about how to hold them.

The attitudinal risk in working with families where care is multigenerational is a form of fatalism that is rarely articulated but frequently operating. It shows up in how staff describe certain families in handovers and team meetings: the resigned tone, the assumption of inevitable dysfunction, the jokes that flatten complex family histories into caricature. It shows up in the quality of preparation for contact visits — the reduced effort, the lowered expectation. It shows up in case formulations that describe a family as "chaotic" without asking what produced the chaos or who was responsible for attending to it. The research on practitioner attitudes in child protection consistently finds that families perceived as multiply disadvantaged — and families with intergenerational care experience sit clearly in this category — receive lower quality assessment and engagement than those perceived as more capable. Residential care is not insulated from this. The homes that do this work well are the ones that actively interrogate these tendencies in supervision, that expect workers to account for their assumptions about families with care histories, and that measure the quality of family engagement not by whether the parent shows up but by what the home is doing to make showing up possible. Staff who have spent time thinking about what it actually meant to be a child in care — what it feels like to have your life managed by professionals, to move between placements, to have your family visited and assessed and found wanting — are better placed to extend something like genuine empathy to the adults those children became. That empathy is not a soft extra. It is the relational condition under which meaningful family work becomes possible.

The structural obligation is one that extends well beyond individual homes. A care system that takes a child into care without adequately supporting the parent's own unresolved care history is a system producing the conditions for the cycle to repeat. Local authorities with genuine corporate parenting ambitions attend to care-experienced adults — not just children — and recognise that failing to support a care-experienced young person into stable adult life, secure housing, and adequate mental health provision is not a matter of that young person's individual destiny but of a system's cumulative accountability. Where those obligations were not met a generation ago, the children now in care are part of the evidence of that failure. Residential homes cannot repair this structural accountability on their own. But they can refuse the framing that treats multigenerational care as a family pathology rather than a systemic outcome, and they can be meticulous about what they do within their own practice to hold both generations' needs in view. What the child in their care needs and what the child's parent needed — and what that parent, now an adult, still needs — are not unrelated questions. The homes that hold that connection thoughtfully produce better practice: more honest life story work, more genuinely supported contact, less fatalism in the team room. They also model, for the young people in their care, what it looks like to refuse easy explanations of complicated histories — which is a lesson worth teaching, and one that takes a lifetime to learn.