Previous research has shown that children who are maltreated by their parents are at risk of poor peer relationships and low self-esteem. Children’s emotional well-being can be affected and this may have a negative impact on their personal and social lives at home, at school, and in the wider community. In this project, funded as a three-year PhD programme, we worked with the Brighton & Hove Fostering & Adoption team to investigate whether the links between maltreatment and such socio-emotional difficulties are mediated by children’s social understanding and empathy (i.e., understanding others’ beliefs, desires, and emotions, and responding emotionally to others’ feelings).

Nikki Luke (now at University of Oxford) was the PhD researcher on this project, supervised by Robin Banerjee. Her research was intended to inform interventions by practitioners and foster parents to assist maltreated children in promoting positive social and emotional development, as well as support and training strategies for staff and carers. The project involved a meta-analysis of existing research studies in this area, in-depth qualitative research to understand and disseminate the perspectives of foster carers, and detailed assessments of links between parenting experiences and socio-emotional development in children aged 7 to 11 years. The research involved work with larger samples of children who are not in care, as well as subgroups of children who have been taken into foster care following parental maltreatment.