‘Remember when…’: exploring the experiences of looked after children and their carers in engaging in collaborative reminiscence

Abstract

The background literature outlines the positive impact that life story work can have for children in care, but there is scant published research to support these claims and, to date, none exploring both carers’ and children’s experiences of engaging in collaborative memory work, which can form an important component of a child’s life story. This article explores the experiences of foster carers and looked after children in carrying out such work using the memory store approach, focusing on what their talk could tell us about how using this approach had affected the carer–child relationship, the child’s self-perception, aspects of the child’s thinking and learning, and their emotions. The participants were five foster carers and the four children in their care. Two to three months after a one-day training course for carers in using the memory store approach, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the carers and a board game session took place with each of the children to explore their views. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to guide both the data generation and its subsequent analysis. Carers’ and children’s talk suggested that using the memory store approach has a number of perceived benefits, emotionally, relationally and in terms of the child’s self-perception and learning. A memory store approach model was postulated on the basis of these findings. One of the conclusions of this research is that using the memory store approach (or similar) should be a statutory requirement of foster carers, not only because of the potential benefits highlighted through this research but also because of the ethical necessity to safeguard the memories of a child’s time in care.