About the project

Me & My Foster Family – Improving the Lives of Foster Children (MOMP) is a project aimed at enhancing the well-being of children and young people placed in foster care. Based on an initiative from Trygfonden, the project is being carried out by researchers at University College Copenhagen. The first phase of the project, 2018-2022, was financed with grants from Trygfonden and The A.P. Møller Relief Foundation. The current phase, funded by Trygfonden, commenced in November 2024 and will end in March 2027.

The imperative of appropriate action to reduce the gap between children in out-of-home care and their peers in the general population has long been clear. However, the question of what forms such action should take has no single, clear answer. Me & My Foster Family chooses to focus on introducing standardized screening tools into routine social work practice as a means of improving the ability of social workers to monitor the well-being and learning of children placed in out-of-home care.

In Me & My Foster Family, this monitoring is done using the screening questionnaire responses of foster parents, staff at the children’s school or daycare, and the children themselves, if they are old enough. Using such questionnaires, the social workers and the adults who are with the child on a daily basis have the opportunity to compare the foster child's well-being and learning skills with children of the same sex and age-group in the general population. 

"The adults close to the children usually have a pretty good sense of how things are going, but some of them may gradually become accustomed to poor well-being and a low level of academic skills. They become somewhat desensitized, so to speak. With the tools provided by the project, they get a speedometer to steer by," explains Charlotte Bredahl Jacobsen, Head of Research at University College Copenhagen.

The idea is that the systematic well-being and learning assessments can initiate more focused dialogues between foster families and foster family consultants regarding the support needs of the child and areas where extra effort is required.

“With the tools provided by the project, they have a speedometer to navigate by.”

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Charlotte Bredahl Jacobsen
Head of Research, University College Copenhagen