BEING AN AMATEUR JUDGE

One of the hardest things in parenting is sorting out disputes between your children. It follows that one of the hardest things in fostering is disputes between foster children. 

Even harder is a squabble between your own child and your foster child.

I've only ever seen courtroom judges on TV and in films, where they usually come across as being stuffy and quirky. They don't seem to do any judging either. The jury does the judging. The judge gets to say things like "Sustained!" when one of the lawyers goes "Objection your honour!", which is a judgement on a detail of procedure. The business of deciding whether a person did something criminal is down to the jury. Then there are magistrates who decide who's right and wrong in civil cases. Small claims courts settle minor financial disputes. 

Totally different  are TV judges like Judge Judy and Jeremy Kyle who get to see the domestic war recreated on camera for our entertainment, and then do a bit of hammed up deliberating to get the studio audience cheering.

The professional judges have it easy by comparison to us. Every dispute in court hinges on laws which have been made so anyone can get the appropriate book down from the shelf and look it up.

Same with the police. When they get called in they have to decide if they think a law might have been broken. In the "good old days" we like to tell each other, a bobby would use his common sense and knowledge of human nature to suss what was going on, give someone a clip round the ear and cycle off for his tea. 

Thankfully, squabbles between foster children are rare in my experience, but when they happen I find myself adjudicating like a cross between Judge Judy and one of those old-fashioned bobbies, except I can't cycle off for my tea, because most squabbles seem to break out around the house when I'm cooking tea.

Example:

 The Crown versus the Missing Lego Piece 

January 2014

PC Plod (Me): "Acting on the noise coming from the living room, I proceeded in a westerly direction from the kitchen, having turned down the pasta, and moved the saucepan to the back of the cooker for safety reasons, your honour. On arriving at the scene I ascertained that Spongebob was ended and that a dispute had begun about a Lego figure who was missing one of the lightning horns off his helmet."

Judge Judy (Me): "Whose Lego is this one anyway, they all look alike to me."

My Child: "It's my Klanggo, God mum, you bought it with me, it's the one I got with gran's money."

Foster Child: "Yeah but the head isn't, it's the head off Zendip, who you gave me when we swapped it for my mum's Wi control"

My Child: "It's not, his head didn't fit when we tried, nor does the flamethrower, does it mum?"

Foster Child: "If my mum was here she'd tell you."

PC Plod: "At this point your honour, I inferred that Defendant A (My Child) hoped that if he made enough of a song and dance of it, the judge would be bound to agree with Defendant A on the basis of family. Defendant B (Foster Child) hoped that you were bound to agree with him because he's had more than his share of troubles already and that if you didn't it would be because you're biased."

Judge Judy: "Okay everyone here's what I'm gonna do. First I'm gonna do denial over bias, and make out it's unthinkable because if I allow anyone to think there is any bias going on we're all losers. Secondly I'm gonna make out that there's a chance I can solve this one AND come up with a solution everyone likes, even though that's never happened once in the entire human history of children's squabbles. So each of you go and look in your bedrooms for the lightning thing while I finish the pasta. And if you find it you can both have a lolly after tea."

Verdict: Judge Judy decided that in future all swapping is completely banned and that both parties received a lolly after tea for trying hard to find the missing lightning horn of Klanggo, which never turned up. Her joke that it must have fallen through a rip in the space/time curtain bombed. She resolved in future to get tea on the table to coincide with the Spongebob end credits. 

Epilogue: As usual Judge Judy went back to the pasta full of self-doubt that she'd failed everyone; that both children were disappointed with the time honoured parent fudge verdict "You're both a bit right and both a bit wrong". She thanked her de-escalation training: you should calm tempers with distractions rather than confronting the problem, because the problem is usually deeper than the one you're presented with.

Mostly, she believes she is still one jump ahead of anyone thinking she has favourites. Which, being human, she has.

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A TROUBLE SHARED

Sometimes you have to try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.

What's that joke by Ellen Degeneres? "If you don't like someone walk a mile in their shoes. Then at least you're a mile away. And you've got their shoes."

Hasn't she done well while we're on the subject? Seems like she's America's second biggest chat show host after Oprah Winfrey. Hasn't she done well too.

Sorry, I drifted off the subject.

Foster children have all got a massive past behind them, and one of the most rewarding things about fostering is helping them to deal with it.

I had a teenager stay with us for about 3 months while they tried to assess whether his mum could have him go back to her. She had some mental health issues. The lad had a lot of stored up feelings, partly because his mum had a speech difficulty and couldn't really manage a conversation. He could cuss alright, although interestingly he never swore in front of my own children. But he didn't know how to open up. Then one day, when it was just him and me in the house (I think he'd pulled a sickie and swung the day off school), the floodgates opened. 

What happened was this; I mentioned to him in passing that my husband's dad had been unkind to his children, which he had. The boy asked me in what way unkind. I said he'd always made them feel unwanted, a nuisance, used to humiliate them, knocked them about a bit. The boy respected Bill because Bill is very straightforward and although he's quite blokeish and strong he's also very gentle.

The boy said that his dad wasn't much good either. Then he was off on one. Talking ten to the dozen about his dad, the drink, the fights, his fears for his mum, his misery at school, why he ended up in a police cell, how he hated his brother, how he feared for his brother, and that he didn't think his life would ever be anything but grief.

He shed some tears, quiet ones trickling down both cheeks, I went and fetched the kitchen roll. He talked for about 15 minutes, that's a long time to talk non-stop. I just kept quiet and listened, and tried to imagine myself in his skin enduring so many troubles.

I know it did him good just to tell it like it was, and he definitely moved up onto a better plane afterwards. I'm not saying he turned the corner or anything miraculous, life's not like that. But he was calmer around the home, and he made me cups of tea and what have you, because he and I had shared, plus he knew I wasn't in any way trying to be better than his mum, I'd always made that clear: his mum was his only mum and nothing would ever change that.

Long story short, the boy wanted desperately to go home because he wanted to protect his mum and he had a point. She couldn't even use a phone. She could text, but when her top-up ran out she was out of contact and he panicked for her.

I can't go into much more detail about him because there are still issues, but he's back with her, and in some ways a wonderful son.

Looking back I think I moved up a plane too, just walking in his shoes for a bit.

Now I'm back thinking about Ellen Degeneres. I wonder if the difficult things she's dealt with in her life have made her a better person? Stronger maybe. Same with Oprah Winfrey, she was born to an unmarried teenager and brought up rough wasn't she?

Some people definitely go on to have fine lives BECAUSE of the trouble they've dealt with, not IN SPITE of it.

That's our job as foster carers, to try and make that happen.

Best job ever, BTW.

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THE NEXT BIGGEST THING IN FOSTERING

There’s no doubt in my mind that the internet is going to become the biggest bugbear in fostering any day now, maybe it already is.

Not long ago I would have bet that nothing could come along to knock Contact off the Number One spot.

The thing about both these challenges is there’s lots of positives to be had from each of them, but plenty of negatives too and we’re the ones who have to manage them.

When I say “Contact”, in case you’re new to fostering, I’m talking about the arrangement whereby your foster child is taken to meet their “significant others”, generally once a week. The child often gets their hopes up that each Contact will accelerate the arrival of better times. And to be fair, Contact does help towards reconciling the family. The immediate aftermath, when the child comes back to your home with you, instead of going back to their real home with mum and dad, is usually a sad child.

My predecessor as Secret Foster Carer won me over when she blogged about how Contact could be made a better experience, by delaying the first Contact until the child is settled, by tailoring the meeting to suit the family’s problems, by coaching the parents in what the child needs. But as far as the authorities are concerned their spirit is willing but the wallet is weak. Everything costs money, and until the good times are back local authorities have to watch the pennies, and foster carers must make the best of what we’re given. The saving grace of Contact, the reason we carers can get on top of it, is because once you get to know the child the parents and the routine, you can do damage limitation.

Unlike the internet. The internet has changed in the time you’ve been reading from the top of this blog. I saw a programme about the internet in which an executive from one of the high tech companies told the interviewer “Every day is Day Zero”. Everything that’s gone before in internet history is, well, history.

Take email. For hundreds of years people used hand-written letters to correspond. Suddenly letter writing was a dead duck (“Snail mail”). Email had arrived.  Guess what; email’s dead. There are young people who turn up for work on their first day and have to be taught how to do it by the office dinosaurs (people aged thirty-plus). The young have even moved on from Facebook, Skype, Twitter and text messaging. They are now using other things.

To be totally honest I never really got into a stride with any of those new ways of communicating, if I want to say something to somebody I pick up the phone and talk. Blogging is about as clever as I can get.

When I started fostering, which wasn’t very long ago, there was one golden rule; foster children were not allowed to have their laptops upstairs.

Oh happy days. Laptops are easy to patrol. A young person couldn’t slip a laptop into their pocket and sneak it into the bathroom. They couldn’t log on the internet on the school bus or in the playground. I learned how to ensure Parental Controls were switched on, and how to use “History” to see what the laptop had been used for (under supervision from Blue Sky and my social worker).

But that was yesterday.

Today mobile phones are computers. Anyone can get onto the internet anywhere, anytime, provided they have a phone which is internet-enabled. And I’m told that nobody would dare show their face if they had a phone that wasn’t.

They can roam and surf any of the estimated 649 million websites out there. They can theoretically communicate with any of the 2,480 million people who are internet users. (I just Googled those facts 10 minutes ago, so remember they are already out of date).

Our worry, of course, as foster carers, is that our foster children stay safe.

That they aren’t bullied or learn to bully. That they are only communicating with appropriate people. That they don’t look at inappropriate material.

You hear about kids arrested for plotting terrorism, other kids who disappear. Extreme cases, yes, but they usually seem to have their origins in social media and individuals they meet on the internet.

What do we foster carers do? At Blue Sky there are staff who are assigned to the problem, and not surprisingly they always seem to be updating their advice. There are regular training sessions on the latest things, what to look out for, and what to do.

Bill and I agree we both stay alert to any changes in mood among our placements. We try to make sure they know we are alert to any misuse of their phone, and most important, that the reason we are alert is we have their own welfare and happiness at the front of our thinking.

We don’t allow mobile phones at the meal table, but we do allow them downstairs in the living room (we can monitor how much time is spent on them). We try to ensure that bedtime means lights out and no phone, and yes we have confiscated phones until morning in spite of the aggro it causes.

Phones do tend to cause differences of opinion, but In fostering you can’t always push all the right buttons.

Incidentally, did you know that you can tell how old a person is by how they ring your doorbell? People of my generation use their forefinger. Young people, brought up on mass-texting, use their thumbs.

That’s if they need to ring, half of them are texting they are “just coming up the path c u in 10 secs”.

C U soon. LOL.

SFC

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FAMILIES AND FOSTERING

 

Our family were all very interested when they found out we were becoming foster carers. We didn’t send out the news to all four corners, nor tried to keep it secret.

Part of the process of becoming approved as a carer is having Blue Sky go and meet some people who are close to you. In my case they visited my mum and one of my best friends. After the meeting my mum phoned, said nice things about the young lady, and how interesting it was to have a long chat about things that are dear to her, such as our children and what we’re like as parents. She also asked if she could tell her sister, as she was going to be seeing her soon. From that point it’s top family news, right up there with who’s having a baby and why a cousin is getting divorced.

When you start fostering, and the placements arrive, the family stays interested, and the tricky bit is choosing which relatives to tell what information about the child. The child’s right to privacy is paramount. It’s not right to tell even your mum anything about what happened to the child before they came to live with you. It’s hard, because you sometimes feel that you’re suggesting that your own flesh and blood can’t be trusted. It’s hard because you crave an outlet for some of the harsh realities of fostering. You can, and should, pass on healthy stuff about how your foster children are getting on as part of your family, things like how much they are fascinated by your tropical fish, how you’ve persuaded them to eat peas.

Christmas has just come and gone, and that meant meeting up with family, at your house or theirs. For the child, a bewildering bunch of strangers; something they may find alarming – strangers in the house. You tell them in advance what it’s going to be like, who will be there, and that they are allowed to go off and be with the other children and play.

The gathering will all be aware of all sorts of changes to the family make-up over the previous 12 months, the cousin’s absent husband and ...the foster children.  So, when asked (usually in a whisper) you say they are doing great, and have brought a great deal of pleasure to the family, which has plenty enough truth about it to remind you that you’re doing okay.

Most of our extended family are brilliant with our placements. They behave as if the foster children are family children, ask us on the phone about whether to give the child a present, compliment the child on their skill on X Box or how well they’ve built their Lego Friends house, ask if they want another glass of juice when they’re doing a drinks run, and so on.

But, there’s always one adult or two perhaps, who struggle a bit. A family member much loved, but whose social skills are well, not world class. Or maybe one of those people who simply don’t get the world of children, astonishing because they were once a child themselves, have they no memories? Have they shut out their childhood? They're harmless, of course, just a bit clumsy chatting with other people's children.

Annoyingly, they will “make an effort” with your children, including your foster child, and you can hear the unmistakeable sound of toes curling all around the room as they;

·         Ask a streetwise twelve year old who is in the process of giving up smoking and already has a tattoo; “What did Father Christmas bring you this year?”

·         Tell the child what Christmas was like in 1953

·         Tell the foster child how lucky they are

·         Talk in front of the children about sensitive things like why Twerking is disgusting and why a cousin is getting divorced

·         “Joking” that if the children eat chocolate their teeth will fall out or they’ll get fat

·         Asking a child which football team they support, then getting stuck in because they have a problemt with Man Utd

 

This year, to his enormous credit, our foster child actually fought back. A married couple, family member’s of Bill, asked the boy what he’d got for Christmas, so he went and fetched his main present to show them. They looked at it for one and a half seconds, said something like “Oh, isn’t that lovely” without the slightest understanding of what it was. Nor did they care; they were much more interested in adult gossiping. The child started to explain how the toy functioned when they both turned away to continue discussing Arsenal and why a cousin is getting divorced. The child threw the toy to the floor. I asked if he was okay. He announced in a loud clear voice, that he had been asked what he’d got for Christmas, then when he showed them they all started talking. Cue slightly embarrassed silence. Excellent. Out of the mouths of babes etc.

Bill and I have talked about whether we deal with the problem in advance, by speaking to the family and advising them how to behave. Or by staying on full alert throughout the gathering, and talking to the children afterwards to make sure it’s a positive experience. For us, it’s the latter every time.

We believe that part of the process of childhood is the child discovering for themselves that there are adults in the world you like, because they have time for you, and respect your world, and adults who just don’t. They discover this is true at school, because they have teachers they look forward to and others they don’t. We are happy to share with them that my gran is a hoot and has a heart of gold. And yes, cousin Victor (not real name obviously), is a bit of a misery guts when it comes to children. But we love him too.

 

 

 

 

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Fostering and Holidays

IT'S midwinter, which means that any day now we’re going to start getting bombarded with holiday advertisements. They usually leave it until about the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Day, then suddenly TV commercials start popping up alongside all the ones for Sales and keep fit products. Lovely images of golden beaches, or a handsome loving couple sitting in an exotic restaurant on board a cruise liner.

HOLIDAYS are interesting things every time, but when you’re fostering they take on a huge new significance.

BEFORE fostering, the biggest significance of the holiday used to be when you had to decide whether you and your new partner are solid enough to go away together. If you met him after you booked a singles holiday with your pals should you invite him along? Is it practical? 

IF you decide to go on holiday together it’s seen as taking your relationship to a new level, almost like buying a ring. If your relationship has been a bit up and down, but the holiday is booked, your friends will say that the fortnight will be “make or break”.

HOLIDAYS, when you’re fostering, have the same sort of impact on your family and your placements.

FOR a start, it’s risky planning ahead, or at least, it’s complicated. Who hasn’t kept putting off booking their holiday because, quite simply, you don’t know how many of you it will be?

WHEN foster carers accept a new placement, the job is to begin forming an attachment-based relationship with a young person, whilst simultaneously working to prepare them for successfully going home.

AFTER a short while, I find, you get a bead on the child’s situation, and say to yourself, for example “There’s no way s/he is going to be able to go home for months, at least that’s how it seems to me, having got to know the family through turning up at Contact”. You run it past your social worker and they lay out all the processes such as reviews, or court proceedings or whatever. 

WE once had a teenager stay with us for three weeks, the reason being his permanent foster carers liked to go on holiday without him. 

SOUNDS harsh, but that seemed to be it in a nutshell. Actually his carers were very fond of him, and he liked and respected them. But he was a teenager, and a cottage in the south of France is no place for a streetwise young man to while away lazy days reading a book before strolling to the bistro. He was far too polite to say so, but the prospect of being shacked up with a middle-aged couple probably filled him with one of the big teenagers dread fears, namely boredom.

SO he shacked up with another middle-aged couple (ourselves), stayed out late every night, then stayed awake till dawn listening to music and nipping out the back for a rollup (approved by his SW – he was old enough and it was normal baccy) every hour or so. 

HE had a fascinating quirk. You know those big spiders that come out in the house during the night? Apparently they are looking for a drink, which is why sometimes they end up in the bath, if you have a dripping tap. This lad would spot a spider scurrying across the carpet, and put a drinking glass over it. Then he’d write a note about the incident, and place the note next to the glass prison, with an arrow pointing to it. He’d use block capitals to write things like:

“QUARTER PAST FOUR THIS MORNING CAME OUT FROM UNDER THE SOFA RUNNING TOWARDS THE DOOR LIKE THERE WAS A FIRE SAME ONE AS LAST NIGHT I THINK SAME SIZE AND DEFINITELY GOT THE SAME WALK BIT ARROGANT YES?”

ONE morning we came downstairs and there were three glasses on the floor each with a prisoner inside sitting awaiting their fate. I’m a bit arachnophobic, so Bill let them out in the garden.

IT told us a lot about how the lad perceived his life in care. The spiders were captive in a glass prison, their fate to be determined by someone else, reports written about them, judgements passed about them, suspicions harboured about possible wrongdoing.

THAT'S one of the many fascinating aspects of fostering, you get to be an amateur psychologist all day long, which is rich, but tiring.

ANOTHER reason why foster carers need their holiday.

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Fostering - The Importance of Being a 'Mum'

I mentioned to my own mum that I’m writing a Blog for Blue Sky about fostering. Mum says she gets cyber things like the internet and mobile phones, but, come on mum, if you’re reading this, you know it’s a bit of a mystery. 

I’M in a generation sandwich with technology. I have parents who don’t get it, and yet my kids think I don’t get it either.

MY kids tell me that not only is email dead, but Facebook is for losers, and as for Twitter, their generation never did it anyway. They are into the latest things whose names I’ve already forgotten, things which come as apps, which I don’t really get.

I remember when I was a teenager that anything about my world that my parents understood was no use to me because I wanted my own world. I hated it if my dad liked (or pretended he liked) bands I liked. If my mum approved of a new hair look I’d spent my pocket money on I was disappointed. I actually once went upstairs in a huff and ruffled up a style I’d spent ages on because my mum said it looked beautiful.

ANYWAY, I got the blog up on her PC for her, and she read some posts. She said some nice things, and a few criticisms like parents do. Parents criticise not because they don’t rate your efforts, but because they are desperate for you to be as good as you possibly could be at everything.

IF I was honest, I wanted mum to say “Wow, that’s fantastic, you’re a great blogger”. 

I wanted her to watch me write one, and be impressed. I even wanted her to say how amazing I am with computers, because computers are like magic to her. I’ll never forget the time she watched a fax come through on our fax machine, she almost ran out of the room spooked.

THING is, now that I’m a foster carer, bringing up children isn’t just a matter of being a mum, it’s my job. 

My vocation. I’m a professional mum. If you’re a foster carer the same applies to you. You’re a professional parent.

IF your child has a sore throat, you do a bit of mild medicalism; a spoonful of Calpol and feed them runny food. Then you get them to a doctor in case it’s tonsils or an infection, and let the professional take over.

OKAY a doctor trains for 7 years, whereas foster carers are assessed over 6-12 months, then do regular training sessions, but most of us have had our own kids, and that was a training session longer than seven years.

THE thing is that I was sitting next to my mum at her computer, watching her read my blogs, and I came over all childlike. I had a bit of what they call an epiphany. A moment. I learned something, something huge, that I now use with my fostering and I want to share. See if it makes sense to you.

WHAT it is is this; I wanted my mum’s endorsement of my blogs more than anything else. More than my husband, more than Blue Sky, more than anybody, I wanted MY MUM to say “Well done!”

NOW here’s the thing. When my own kids came out of school with a painting they’d done, I would gush how good it was. When they went to bed nicely I would tell them how good they were. When they played football or were in the school Nativity play I would tell them I was proud. 

THEIR reaction was always a warm glow at my engagement with their efforts.

SO far, so normal.

WHEN I started fostering, and a child did something clever on a skateboard or got a star for a piece of schoolwork I would do the obvious and act like I acted with my own kids, like it pleased me.

THERE was often a different reaction from the child. They might stop skateboarding and strop off indoors. I remember a nice painting being ripped up.

WHY? Because I was dumb enough to pretend to be their mum. It only reminded them that they’re being cared from away from their real mum. Maybe even reminded them that their own mum isn’t kind enough to watch them at play, or celebrate their successes. 

IF my mum had shown zero interest in my blogs, I’d have felt hollow inside. If I’d been told that another woman was going to stand in for my mum and be nice about my blog like a good mum should, I’d have been pretty poisonous about her efforts.

SO what I do now with this little corner of fostering, is to say to the looked after child, when they come and say they’ve broken their own record on Super Mario,  or they manage to eat some broccoli, or clean their teeth without being nagged is “Well done! We must remember to tell your mum at Contact”. Or something like that. Not every time, obviously, but often enough to make a subtle point.

I find you often get a peaceful reaction, as they envisage their real mum giving them a hug and saying how proud she is, and just for a moment, they have the mum of their dreams, literally, even if the reality a few days later, when they show mum their schoolwork, is a rude awakening.

PLUS I try to compliment their success by saying “Don’t let Bill have a go at that kerb trick with your skateboard he’ll break a leg” or having a go myself at Super Mario and crashing into the first cliff – not hard, that one.

Happy fostering.

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Fostering - being non-judgmental

MY current looked-after child has been opening up about his life before coming into care, my social worker says it’s good for him to talk. She says the sort of things that have happened to him are all too common. The hard part for us is listening to the experiences he tells us about, it hurts to hear it. The even harder part is finding the right thing to say after he’s shared.

MY best friend who is also a foster carer, says her current child has similar stories to tell. It seems to be the case that the average parent whose children have to go into care hasn’t set out to be a bad parent, they just haven’t a clue about looking after children, and spend all their time trying to manage their own chaotic lives.

HE tells us things in bits and pieces, his social worker fills in the gaps, not by way of gossip, but because carers need to know as much as possible about the child in our care to do the job.

SO, this was a typical day for him (actually, this isn’t a typical day for him due to confidentiality reasons as I cannot share this, but the description below does reflect the typical day a looked after child may experience based on listening to others during our foster care support groups.) 

MUM gets up late and starts the day shouting at her own mum into a mobile that she’s getting a Court Order against “Dad” because he had it off with his girlfriend on the sofa last night while she was up the pub. According to Dad, he’s left mum six weeks ago because of her drugs. He says he’s been sleeping on a mate’s sofa. Mum likes to go to the pub most nights because she has a hard time looking after all the kids all day and she needs her “Me Time”.  Mum is incidentally, obese, pregnant, and was in care herself when she was a child. Dad is nearer seven feet tall than six and has been to prison for assault.

MUM hasn’t a job, nor has Dad. Dad needs money because he needs to go to all his teams home and away games, and that’s expensive.  His benefit doesn’t pay for his travel, beers, fags and other stuff, so there’s a big issue about how much of the child benefit he is entitled to.  Mum makes Dad do babysitting shifts so she can go out and she pays him. He brings fish and chips and beer and watches the big flat screen TV all evening. The children are locked in their bedrooms. The doors have had brackets and padlocks fitted. The doors were opened to push in sausage and chips in paper wrappers and they were told to be quiet. He leaves when Mum texts she’s on her way home.

AFTER midnight there’s a big argument on the phone, with Mum accusing Dad of everything from having his girlfriend show up even though she’s banned from the home, to pushing his fish and chip wrappers down the back of the sofa instead of clearing them away.

NEXT morning her eldest (now with us) has wet the bed again, and needs to learn he shouldn’t, so she removes all his toys from his bedroom, he can have them back when he goes a week dry. She opens his bedroom window and hangs the wet sheet on the sill to air, it doesn’t smell that much, if it’s not dry tonight he can sleep on the bare mattress. He has to learn. Mum probably thinks this sort of parenting is what everyone does, because it’s all she knew when she was little, and her friends agree with her, even help with more advice about how to control kids.

HER eldest goes out and stays out all day, she is worried sick. She calls her friends, then the Dad, her social worker then finally the police.  After her eldest comes home safe and everyone else has gone away she takes his confiscated toys into the garden and makes him watch as she smashes them all to pieces. He has to learn not to disappear. 

HAD enough yet?

THERE'S definitely more to come, and when it does we’ll continue to listen, trying to be neutral. By which I mean we don’t pass judgement on his parents while at the same time being sympathetic, which is the tricky balancing act. The thing is he doesn’t know his life was unusual and wrong, he assumes it’s normal, as all children do. Until they see what family life should be like.

OUR job as foster carers is to work towards the family getting back together, but every other carer I’ve talked to about this agrees that unless and until the parents get proper help with their parenting the cycle will just go on.

THE children? They all seem to want to go home, no matter what home was like, no matter what the parenting. They quietly plot and scheme ways they can get their parents to love and like them, it’s painful to see.

PAINFUL, and probably futile.

OUR own children have benefitted in many ways from our going into fostering. There have been problems, of course, but among the many benefits has been them learning, well, how lucky they are.

HAPPY Fostering

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