Blue Cabin’s Local Authority Specialist, Joanne Stoddart, discusses the role of foster carers in life story work with care-experienced children and young people.
As a foster carer you may be about to welcome your first child or young person into your home, or you may already be experienced and have supported and nurtured many children over the years. However, you will all have one thing in common: you need to rely on being provided with information about the child you are about to care for, or is already in your care, from their social worker.
As a foster carer, you are the primary caregiver for the child in your care, and you will need to be a very important trusted adult for that child. Although I have never been a foster carer, over my career I have been involved with many foster carers and have sadly been required to chair disruption meetings when children’s placements have needed to end.
Here are three lessons I’ve learned on the importance of understanding a foster child’s experiences:
1. Information sharing is paramount
I have heard many stories from foster carers over the years about their different accounts of how much information they had been provided with at the outset of a child moving into their home, or during the child’s stay with them. This can often be compounded by the number of social workers a child may experience, meaning their history may become diluted and valuable information may be lost over time.
A social worker who has been involved with a child for a significant period of time will have very rich information and intelligence about a child and their family, whilst a social worker who has only recently become involved has to rely on information contained in records, and a lot of information may not have been captured effectively.
If you do not have a full understanding of a child’s history and experiences, how can you be expected to adapt your parenting style to the child’s individual needs?
2. Foster carers need support too
Foster carers often share how difficult it can be to care for a child who appears to want to reject them and push against boundaries. We all know that the key to success is the ability to form nurturing relationships and attachments between the adult and child. However, foster carers need to be supported in order to build this relationship with the child, and to enable the child to trust in their foster carer’s ability to keep them safe, secure and nurtured in order to allow them to move forward in their lives.
3. The need for understanding and empathy
In understanding why the child in your care presents in the way they do, or reacts in certain ways or in particular scenarios, you need to have a full understanding of the child’s history in order to join the dots and to make sense of the child’s previous and current world, and to understand the world through the child’s eyes.
When a child is struggling with the impact of separation and loss from their birth family, or may be presenting behaviours which are detrimental to their best interests, they need support to understand their past in order to make sense of their present. As a foster carer you will be expected to manage the care of a child in potentially very challenging circumstances.
Listen to our podcast episode on attachment, trauma and their impact on children and young people ->
Good quality life story work is invaluable in supporting the child to process their emotions and feelings, and also for you as their main caregiver to enable you to understand the source of why the child in your care reacts and responds in the way they do.
Children need to engage with a trusted adult
In engaging children with life story work it is crucial that a child’s trusted adult, usually their foster carer, is involved in the work alongside the child’s social worker. When a child is helped to process their memories and emotions, they are likely to reflect on information shared and the feelings and emotions they are experiencing with their trusted adult – you.
A secure base will help to counter any adverse reaction
Equally, a child may react adversely and need to have a safe person and secure base to be able to express their emotions with, usually their trusted adult – again you. If you as the child’s trusted adult are not involved in life story work, you will be unaware of what is being discussed, how the child is responding, and be unaware of what strategies to put in place in the home to ensure the child feels safe.
Traditional life story work should include the child in your care, their social worker and you as the child’s foster carer. However, in my experience this does not always happen.
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Joanne Stoddart is a Local Authority Specialist working with both Blue Cabin, she also holds a role in a regional adoption agency. She is an experienced children’s social worker and manager, with almost 25 years’ experience working in Local Authorities. She has held various roles from children’s social worker to head of service, all within statutory children’s services, with significant direct experience of working with care-experienced children and young people. Joanne has been involved in Blue Cabin’s Creative Life Story Work project over the past three years, and has worked closely and collaboratively with Blue Cabin throughout.
