As a foster parent, you’ll play a key role in supporting children to maintain and develop safe, healthy bonds with their family members. Let’s learn more about why spending time with family is beneficial for children in foster care, and how you can be a child’s emotional support as they navigate their relationships.
Key takeaways…
- Keeping in contact with family is important and should always be centred around a child’s unique needs.
- Long-term separation from loved ones can have life-long consequences for children, such as leading to a breakdown in sibling relationships or not having access to a strong support network as an adult.
- It’s vital that foster parents understand why birth family connections are important for foster children, and that we as professionals approach families with empathy.
Why do foster children keep in touch with their birth families?
The goal of fostering isn’t for children to be severed from their family relationships; instead, it’s to provide them with a safe, healthy environment in which to grow up. For many children in short-term fostering placements, this means that they’ll spend a short time in the care of a foster family before returning to a healed home. Children in long-term fostering will usually stay with their foster families until they turn 18.
Regardless of what type of fostering suits a child’s needs, it’s usually in a child’s best interests for them to be able to keep in touch with members of their family. Children need a holistic understanding of their life story and deserve the chance to know their family, even if their relationships with loved ones might not always be perfect. Family time supports children’s understanding of their identity, helps them to sustain vital relationships during periods of separation and promotes the development of healthy, life-long bonds.
What is a foster parent’s role in promoting family contact?
As a foster parent you’ll work with our team and your foster child’s social worker to help ensure that your foster child has positive, enriching family time. Your responsibilities may include:
- Taking your foster child to family time visits, which will often take place in a supervised environment like a family centre.
- To build a strong working relationship with the child’s birth family, helping to promote reunification.
- Supervising contact and giving feedback to social workers.
- To offer reassurance and consistency, helping your foster child to manage their emotions around visiting family.
Do foster children always keep in touch with their family members?
Family contact is a very sensitive issue, and there are some circumstances in which it is deemed inappropriate for children to keep in touch with family members while in foster care. Many people wonder why contact between children and their birth families is sometimes permitted when a child has faced difficult circumstances, such as if they have been abused or neglected at home.
Rest assured that contact in these circumstances will only go ahead after careful consideration, and only if it’s deemed to be in the best interest of the child. Your foster child’s care plan will be regularly reviewed to ensure they’re getting the most out of family visits. If you have concerns about the impact family time is having on your foster child or if a child expresses that they no longer wish to visit a family member, speak with your supervising social worker who’ll be on hand to help.
How to build a good working relationship with your foster child’s birth family
The idea of building a working relationship with your foster child’s family may at first seem daunting, especially if they’ve come from a background of neglect or abuse. Parents, too, may deal with challenging emotions around getting to know a foster parent; they might fear that they are being replaced, wrestle with guilt over the past or may feel a need to tread on eggshells for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
Here are 5 tips on how to build a positive relationship with your foster child’s birth parents or caregivers.
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Lead with empathy.
Every child in foster care comes from a family who have experienced challenges. Struggles may include addiction, poverty, poor mental health or domestic violence. Whatever circumstances may have led to a child being taken into care, it is important to approach families with empathy. The past cannot be changed, but by working with families in a respectful manner, we can help to bring about a brighter future for children.
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Stay child-centred.
Your foster child’s wellbeing should always be at the heart of all your interactions surrounding family time. This means helping them to regulate their emotions before, during and after family visits, letting them know that it’s okay to feel however they feel, and being a pillar of support. It also means not speaking badly of their family members, even if the child themselves expresses negative feelings.
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Be professional.
Be warm and respectful while keeping professional distance and be mindful of how your relationship with a child’s caregivers may impact your foster child. Some children may be put at ease by seeing you and their family getting along and having a laugh, while others may become uneasy if their foster parent seems overly familiar with a caregiver who they feel complicated emotions towards.
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Be prepared for ups and downs.
It can be upsetting for everyone involved when a visit doesn’t go as planned. Sometimes a parent may miss a contact session, or a session may have to end unexpectedly, such as if a parent arrives intoxicated or brings along a partner without having first agreed things with a social worker. You’ll need to be resilient to help your foster child deal with the challenging emotions which can arise around family time.
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Rely on professional support.
As a foster parent you’ll work in close partnership with social workers when navigating contact. We offer plenty of support for children as well as support for foster parents, including specific training on navigating family time. Be sure to utilise your support network, and never hesitate to reach out if you need any help from our team.
Siblings— more than just blood connections
One element of family time which cannot be overlooked is the importance of sibling connections. It is unfortunately very common for siblings to be separated when they enter the UK care system, and this separation can damage relationships even into adulthood. Older children and those who come from large sibling groups are more likely to be separated from their siblings.
For some children in foster care, their love for their siblings may be their only trusting familial relationship. We always make an effort to ensure that as many children as possible are able to live with their siblings. There are so many benefits to keeping siblings together, including:
- Living with one another helps to combat loneliness and feelings of worry.
- Being together minimises disruption and can support healing, as children have someone by their side who understands their experiences.
- Children are able to continue growing together, nurturing life-long family bonds.
Even when children are unable to live in the same house together, foster parents play an important role in encouraging positive sibling relationships. This usually involves taking children to visit their brothers and sisters and helping them to keep in touch through virtual means, such as phone calls and video chats. Learn more about why we strive to keep siblings together while in foster care.
