Foster Care Fortnight (16th - 29th May)

Foster Care Fortnight (16th – 29th May) aims to raise awareness of the need for foster carers as well as showcase their commitment, passion and dedication.

For children to have the best start in life, their upbringing is important. Having a place they consider home, a place that is safe and where they feel loved allows them to flourish and develop into adulthood where they can go on to achieve their aspirations and cope with the daily pressures of life. 

Unfortunately, tens of thousands of children across the UK need foster carers while they can’t live with their own families. Fostering is a highly rewarding job and it makes a huge difference to children’s lives. 

Michelle and Teresa talk about their experience as foster carers, below.

Michelle’s story:

“I’ve never had children of my own and it was an opportunity for me to have a family life and I love it! You don’t have to have had children to be a good foster carer. For me, fostering disabled children was the obvious choice as I have worked with disabled children and adults in the past. I find that I click with people with learning disabilities or autism and have an idea of how to communicate with them. The boy I foster is 9 and he’s lovely. He’s great fun although hard work at times but we get on really well. We have bonded.

“I’m a single carer and that means that everything is on my shoulders and it can get a bit tiring but it’s not impossible. You need a good network of friends and family around you and then it is possible to do, like any single carer or lone parent might do. There’s also lots of support. You have a fostering social worker who visits once a month when you can talk through any issues but there is also a support service on the end of the phone 24 hours a day. I’ve used them at midnight and 1am when I was caring for a teenager and they’ve been great – I’ve talked through the situation and been reassured. Often you just need someone to say, ‘It’s OK, you’re doing an OK job’. On top of that there are local support groups and plenty of training available.

“I think one of the most important, and difficult, thing to do is setting ground rules in the beginning. This child comes into a new place and they are thinking, ‘what are the rules? What am I allowed to get away with, what can I push, I’m scared, where am I going to sleep?’ And I’m equally nervous, thinking, ‘how can I make sure he’s OK and knows what the rules are?’ So those first few weeks are difficult for both of you but it gets easier. Now it’s hard to imagine life without him. He’s someone I want to be around and hang out with and he feels the same. It’s so rewarding - he’s become a part of my life and my family and friends have accepted him as part of my family.”

Teresa and Peter’s story:

Teresa and her husband Peter have fostered mainly teenagers for 18 years. 

Teresa said: "We have horses at our stables and one day we discovered a young lad had been living in one of our horse boxes. He was in care and was being fostered. We were unable to foster him, but it opened my eyes to the need for fostering – I hadn’t really realised about the needs of children in care. This boy was the same age as my teenage daughter and I realised what a good life she had got and how this lad was really unlucky."

“Since then we have fostered 30 young people, mainly adolescents. My own children were teenagers at the time that we started so it just made sense. Adolescence is such a crucial time – these children have often fallen out with their families and if their families have problems, they often don’t have a lot of time for the teenager because they are the ones seen as old enough to look after themselves. This is when the stability of a foster home can make all the difference and turn their lives around. They need consistency, love and help and someone to steer them in the right direction." 

“These young people really do become part of the family and we are still in touch with nearly all of them. One boy came to us at 7 and stayed with us until he recently moved out at 25 to live in his own flat with his girlfriend. One is a deputy manager of a mental health unit, another is a bus driver, another works in a nursery and we are so proud of them all. For some of them they are the first member of their family to have a  job. If you give them a few tools to help them out with life, they run with it.”

If you are interested in fostering and would like more information, visit the Kent Fostering website.  

Read our recent article for "Ground-breaking online mental health resource for families".