ODDNESS

Sometimes we foster carers find ourselves wondering about the mental health of people we come into contact with. I've become more aware of mental health problems since I started fostering, that's not to say I know what to do when the problem's in front of me. It's a situation where you're very grateful for your Blue Sky support. If someone's physically ill they go to the doctor, everyone knows...

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PROFESSIONAL FOSTER PARENTS?

The thing that irks me most about other people's attitudes to fostering is the sly remark "They're only doing it for the money". You suspect it more than you actually hear it, and it's one of those lazy prejudices which certain people keep in the same place as their "prisoners have it too easy" and "immigrants are only over here for the benefit". I'm sure plenty of parents trot out the "foster carers...

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UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

There are lots of little things in fostering that mount up. Tiny things, minute details. Take for example, going upstairs to check they're okay. Every evening many if not most foster children retreat to their room. Sometimes they like to spend most of the weekend in there. It can be a battle to get some of them downstairs, one worth winning, but not if it means hostility. They come downstairs...

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ANYONE FOR THIS CHILD?

There's a young woman coming into care who needs a home. She won't want to come into care, she'll want to stay where she is and look after her family, because she has become the head of the house. Her mum has learning difficulties and has had too many children mainly because she is persuaded to the pub five or six nights a week and back to someone else's place. Dad is not on the scene. The mum's...

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THEY SAY WE GET 'COMPASSION FATIGUE'

Don't we all love it when there's an item on the radio or TV news about something we know something about? Doesn't happen a lot, so most of the time we're in the hands of the presenter asking an expert to explain what's what. Yesterday I had Five Live on and up came the subject of fostering. The male presenter introduced the item by saying "It's reported that more and more foster carers are suffering...

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WHAT IS 'ATTACHMENT'?

We foster parents get loss of support and quality advice. I've benefitted enormously from it. There's one thing that eludes me. We are told a lot about the importance of 'attachment' for children in care. I've struggled to pin down exactly what attachment is. On the subject of quality advice, parents generally are given lots of rubbish advice right left and centre by all and sundry from well-meaning...

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STRESS

I had an interesting one yesterday. I picked up our youngest from school and a dad said to me as he walked past the car "I think you've got a bit of a soft tyre" I went round to the passenger side and sure enough the rear tyre looked like I felt, a bit flat. Hmmm. What to do? When you have a foster child in your car you tend to feel extra responsibility. A small voice shrieks a headline: 'FOSTER...

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BOYS WITH MONEY

Someone once said that men are just boys with money. If true it means that boys are just men without money. There's a big point here, I think, because the main problem in dealing with children is insisting they are different from us adults. And paying no attention to how they are the same. You see it all the time. Everyone seems more interested in our differences than our common qualities. It's...

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FOSTERING FOREIGN CHILDREN

Some things make you mad out of proportion. Some things don't make you as mad as you should be. I don't know what's the way to feel about this one: We looked after a twelve year-old child for the weekend. A good lad, well behaved, polite, smart, a decent individual. No-one would guess the horrible stuff he's had to push through. But to look at him, people would assume he's Asian. In fact his...

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LET THEM EAT CAKE

We didn't foster until our own children were old enough to join in the experience. Sometimes I wish I'd fostered before we had our own children. Fostering has made me a better parent, no doubt about it. I don't think I was a bad parent to my own children. Then again who does? In fostering you meet up with people who are close to being jailed for their parenting, and yep, they are all...

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THE MAIN PROBLEM WITH SCHOOL

Every time I have trouble getting a foster child to go to school in the morning it turns out the problem lies in the playground. It never ceases to amaze me that our Education system spends 100% of it's time on what goes on in the classroom. Teachers, Heads, Ofsted, the Department of Education, everybody who thinks they know about "Education" is fixated that their responsibility to our children...

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I HOPE YOU GET MOMENTS LIKE THIS

I had a fantastic fostering experience recently, I had to let the dust settle on it before mentioning it here. I met a foster child who had been with us years before, and I hadn't seen or heard anything about the child for all that time. He was a boy then, he's a young man now. I was at a fostering function, there were three hundred people there, foster children and foster parents. One of...

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