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Being a Foster Carer from a Birth Child’s Perspective

Posted on 26th February 2014 by

Fostering in Manchester

This is one of number of planned articles in the Manchester Fostering series. In this series we’ll attempt to answer some of the questions people from our Manchester Foster Carer Forums have posed and pondered or stories they have told when considering a career a foster care. We hope to also run similar series based on Fostering LiverpoolFostering Lancashire and Fostering Chester in due course. Read one of our birth child’s stories about fostering in Manchester below.

Being a Foster Carer from a Birth Child’s Perspective

“I was 15 when my mum started fostering in Manchester. My brother and sister and I were all fairly independent teenagers at that time and my mum felt that she still had a lot of love and affection to spare. She had raised three children on her own, in a modest house on a modest income in the centre of Manchester, and felt that she must have been doing something right! So she decided to give fostering a go…

Since then, we have welcomed many children into our lives and our home, mainly single children, but occasionally 2 or 3 siblings at a time. They have ranged from a few days old, to 15 years old. Usually, they were not originally from the Manchester area. I will never forget how scared they would often look when they first arrived. Sometimes they would try to mask their feelings, but I could always tell that they were frightened and sometimes sad underneath all the bravado. I would imagine how they must have felt, coming to live in a different house in a strange city with people they barely knew: I understood how lonely they must have been.

However, with time, you could see confidence and happiness gradually building up inside each child as they learned to trust us and relax: they began to feel like they were part of a family, often for the first time. I’ve heard people talk about how foster carers transform the lives of the foster children they look after. What’s not often mentioned is how looked-after children can also change the lives of the families they’re living with. My foster-brothers and foster-sisters have shaped my life for the better, too: helping me understand the deeply positive influence of a caring and supportive ‘family’ in a person’s life, at a time when other teenagers were rebelling against theirs; giving me an early sense of responsibility through helping my mum care for the youngest children who came to live with us.

I now appreciate how carefully we must make decisions – even about things we consider at the time as being trivial – as such choices can have long-term implications in the future. And most of all, they have taught me resilience and respect. Their ability to overcome all sorts of problems in their lives is quite inspirational. I really hope that I have made as much of a positive difference to the lives of my foster brothers and sisters as they have to mine.”

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