ENCOURAGING THEM TO HOPE

 It's hard enough coaxing some enthusiasm out of children, especially when they get into the teenage years.

If I had a square yard of paddock for every time I heard "What's the point?" I could graze a herd of horses.

It was hard enough sometimes to motivate my own to get out of bed and go to school, even though they'd grown up in a home where the motto was that you get out of life what you put in.

I suspect that the problem is that when your children start to become aware that one day they'll have to strike out for themselves; it's scary.

It's even harder with children who come into care.

Harder because they've often started out with role model adults who have given up on the world. Their parents didn't allow themselves any more hopes because their hopes kept getting dashed and to avoid any more disappointments and defeats they don't try any more.

The children learn at their parents feet that aspirations are for suckers. They often learn that rather than try to build a life at work it's safer to fall back on the benefits system. They hear opinions such as;

"If you do have to get a job they make you work stupid hours, treat you like a slave and by the time they've stopped your money for National Insurance and tax you're better off on benefit."

Such like thinkers go looking for stories to back up their philosophy. I've heard;

"They made her take a job as a waitress and one night this load of blokes ran out without paying so they stopped the bill out of her wages."

Or;

"I know someone who knows someone right? Her son went to college and ended up with a student debt. Then when he started a job they started stopping money out of his pay to pay it off and there was nothing he could do about it. And they were still stopping him tax and National Insurance on top."

Many times I've had children stay with us who, when asked gently will say they hope to work with animals. Or children. Please don't think me old-fashioned, but those ideas came up mainly from girls, I'm just reporting things I heard. One hoped to own a sweetshop. One wanted to be a soldier, and another wanted to be a plumber. The rest had no idea, no notion there might be a point in trying.

I've always put only the gentlest of emphasis on the idea that a person will find fulfilment in work, because among the children I was at school with, very few of them ended up loving their jobs.

What I'm leading up to here is that the future has never looked bleaker for young people in the UK setting out in life.

I don't believe there was a single reader of that last sentence who disagreed with it.

But. It's for others to run the country, I really wish them luck.

As fostering folk (if you are one of us), there's a much bigger job in hand; it's galvanizing and inspiring children who have often been reduced to utter despair about their chances by forces we had no control over when those forces had control over the children.

It's always been difficult helping children in care see their potential. Nowadays it's even harder persuading them that the world itself has any potential.

But we do. 

Or at least we try to.

There's probably no solution to the current situation, but that won't stop us giving it our best shot, all day, every day, for every child that comes under our wing.