Fostering

Fostering children in the UK. Fostering is about caring for a child in your own home. For a whole variety of reasons there are around 39,000 children in England who are placed with foster carers by Social Services. Many of these children will eventually return to their families. In some cases this may take a matter of days or weeks in others it may take much longer. If a return to their families is not possible a decision may be made to find them a permanent new family, possible through adoption. In the vast majority of cases children in foster care will have regular contact with their families and their parents will continue to have ...  Read the complete review

It's funny but it's always something that I wanted to do - fostering that is - and when we couldn't have any more children (we have a 5 year old daughter) I decided the time was now to foster. We decided to work with a private agency. Before you wonder "yes"...we can choose an age range/sex that we prefer to foster and you have a supervising social worker to help you make that decision i.e. what kind of child will best fit in with your family. We decided to go for teenage girls (not boys because of the possibility of sexual abuse with our 5 year old - and not young girls because we didn't want our daughter to be competing with attention ...  Read the complete review

I have read the previous reviews on fostering, which mainly seem to be written by foster parents. But what about someone thinking they might have to have their child fostered? This is something I have been concerned about over the last year. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman from a foreign country, found herself pregnant after a two year relationship with a man who she thought would marry her eventually. Of course, as happens all too often, he "did a runner" when she told him about the baby and he has gone abroad, efforts to trace him have been futile. This left the young woman concerned with the choice of bringing up her child on ...  Read the complete review

I have a wonderful foster daughter. She is happy, gorgeous, clever, original, has lived with me for three and a half years, and is in care until she reaches the age of maturity, so we're family now. We see her birth mum and we are going through adoption thanks to a change in the law (NSW, Australia). I agree that you need to understand your needs or requirements when going into fostercare. Self-knowledge is wonderful thing, and taking in a new little person makes it more important. Of course it has all the usual parallels with normal parenthood but it takes a bit more. The 'system' (wherever it resides) may have some challenges. How you handle it depends on ...  Read the complete review

I read a review the other day which prompted me to write mine, on the subject of Fostering. You see, what that review did was something I should have done a long time ago, i.e. used my experience of fostering in an effort to help those trying to make the decision whether fostering children is right for them. My family was a large family. My mother had six children, although what she developed as we grew up was a seeming disinterest in anything except babies. Sounds strange doesn't it ? Although I know that one of my sisters inherited the same trait. It's almost as if there is a need to have little infants around them, and once my sisters and my brother had grown ...  Read the complete review