A New Blueprint for Cultural Mentoring in Out-of-Home Care

Ezekwem-Obi, A., Grace, R., Edenborough, M., Blythe, S., & Karatasas, K. (2026). Cultural mentoring in out-of-home care: Enhancing knowledge, connections, and outcomes for children and adult stakeholders. Children and Youth Services Review, 190, 109240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2026.109240

Introduction

Children in out-of-home care (OOHC) who come from culturally diverse backgrounds face a particular kind of loss: disconnection not just from birth family, but from the language, faith, and traditions that shaped their sense of self before entering the system. There are simply not enough carers from culturally diverse backgrounds to match the growing number of culturally diverse children entering care, meaning many of these children end up in “transcultural placements,” raised by carers who do not share their cultural background. Ezekwem-Obi and colleagues (2026) note that while cultural mentoring has been recognized as valuable for these children, almost no research has examined how it actually functions for the full range of people involved in a child’s care, including birth parents, carers, and caseworkers alongside the children themselves. The authors set out to understand how each of these groups experiences and pursues cultural mentoring differently.

Methods

This qualitative study drew on interviews and focus groups with 34 children (ages 5–18), 31 carers, 10 birth parents, and 76 caseworkers and casework managers across eight service organizations in Australia, mostly in New South Wales. Using a grounded theory approach, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with children, birth parents, and carers, alongside eight focus groups with caseworkers, then applied constant comparative analysis to build a theoretical model.

Results

The analysis revealed two distinct pathways. Adult stakeholders, birth parents, carers, and caseworkers, typically began their cultural mentoring journey by seeking knowledge, driven by a sense of responsibility, which then opened the door to relational connections with cultural mentors, and ultimately led some toward cultural reflexivity, a deeper, ongoing reexamination of their own assumptions and practices. Children followed the reverse sequence entirely: they didn’t seek cultural information at all. Instead, they wanted connection and belonging first. Children became curious about their culture as a byproduct of that trust, not before it. When a trusted relationship with someone who shared their cultural background naturally evolved into mentoring, children became curious about their culture, which then shaped their cultural identity. Ultimately, cultural mentoring is not a single intervention with one starting point. It moves in opposite directions depending on who is receiving it; adults typically progress from knowledge to relationship to reflexivity, while children progress from relationship to knowledge to identity. Treating it as a one-size-fits-all practice risks failing both groups.

Discussion

The authors argue that this reframes cultural mentoring as fundamentally relational and reciprocal rather than hierarchical or expert-driven. They caution against imposing mentoring or a mentor relationship on children, noting that when adults tried to engineer cultural learning without letting the underlying relationship develop organically, children experienced it as an obligation rather than a source of belonging, undermining the very trust the relationship was meant to build. The authors argue that cultural reflexivity—the continuous and sometimes uncomfortable practice of interrogating one’s own assumptions—is what allows cultural mentoring to actually transform practice rather than simply accumulate information. The authors argue against a “deficit” framing that treat birth families as obstacles rather than potential cultural mentors in their own right, capable of contributing meaningfully when approached with patience and cultural humility.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Programs and agencies working in out-of-home care should treat cultural mentoring as an ongoing process. Caseworkers and carers should be given the institutional support to build sustained relationships with members of a child’s cultural community, rather than relying solely on generic cultural competency training that treats culture as static information to be learned once. Agencies should also actively facilitate genuine relationship-building between children and their birth families, recognizing that birth parents can serve as valuable cultural mentors for carers and caseworkers as well as for their own children, provided they are approached with sensitivity given the trauma and stigma many carry from their involvement in the care system. Perhaps most importantly, programs should resist the urge to assign or engineer cultural mentors for children. The findings suggest that children need the freedom to nurture the relationships that feel authentic to them, and that mentoring relationships imposed from outside, however well-intentioned, are unlikely to produce the sense of belonging and cultural pride that this study found was central to a positive outcome.

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