Research Briefing: The Essential Elements of Therapeutic Foster Care

As far back as 2002 in the creation of the Catalyst Program, Mitchell and colleagues developed what was seen as Australia’s first therapeutic foster care program and one of a handful of pioneering programs internationally (Mitchell, 2009; Mitchell, McPherson and Gatwiri, 2020; Porges, 2020; McPherson, Gatwiri, Tucci, Mitchell and Macnamara, 2018). Building on this earlier work, and in the most comprehensive effort to date, Mitchell, Tucci and Macnamara (2020) have proposed a framework of common principles that underpin the emerging paradigm of Therapeutic Care. They argue that the following 12 principles are as relevant to therapeutic approaches to foster care as they are to therapeutic approaches to kinship and adoptive care.