Fostering is all about helping a child from outside your family feel comfortable in your home.
How you do this depends on a) understanding your own home, and b) understanding the foster child.
It's all about working out where the child fits.
I want to flag up the task of WASHING UP.
Age plays a huge part in the whole integration thing, as does personality.
Then there's the matter of how much damage, and what type, the child has met prior to coming into care.
From Day One when a new child arrives, you beaver away trying to place them into your home.
Me; I rarely sit them down and have massive heart-to-hearts.
I know an excellent foster mum who does. She sits her foster children down once a day after school, one-on-one; for a pow-wow about their day, their emotions, their opinions…everything.
Not for me; too formal. It would feel to me like the job interview or a visit to the doctor.
Not the usual, comforting, topsy-turvy exchanges that are true family fare.
Example;
Most children coming into care have no experience of doing household jobs.
Mainly because the jobs rarely got done anyway, but also because the children were seen as a nuisance and were best kept out of things.
So. It's right and healthy to ask everyone in your home to pull their weight. Children benefit from being tasked to trundle the wheelie bin out front, take a black plastic bag up to their room and de-garbage the crisp packets, juice boxes, apple cores and the rest.
The key for me, in getting this done, is them seeing me enjoying doing chores.
I put music on when I cook. Washing the car? LOVE it.
Cards on the table time; I don't ask our children to do many tasks. Why? Because usually I have to go in after them and put it right. Especially the washing up.
Washing up is a job that appears to the average adult to be child-friendly. It involves water, which some think is automatically associated with fun. As for the drying up; what could be simpler than wiping dry some sparkling plates and cutlery with a nice clean tea-towel?
Long story short; I don't ask my foster children to do the washing up. Not no more. No, I've learned.
See, for one thing the washer-upper has it over the dryer upper because they finish first and are off to play. No fair.
A bigger thing is this; I want my kids to enjoy their food, to appreciate their meals and the chat and banter that can go with eating. When they know they've got a boring rotten old job to do after eating, it spoils the whole experience.
There are other things, such as that they often make a bad job of it and plates get put away with gravy stains on the underneath and greasy smears on the forks. You end up fixing the problem yourself.
One last thing; I myself don't like doing the washing. I hate the job. I was made to do it when I was young, every Sunday. I knew my parents made us wash up and dry because they didn't like doing it.
And my foster children would know the same thing. And they'd be annoyed knowing I was getting out of a job I disliked by fobbing it onto them. And that's not a good look in fostering.
Now, in my current household... they LOVE cooking (eldest is getting good). And there's almost a war over who gets to wash the car!
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