What Does It Involve?
- What are the responsibilities of a foster family?
- What does building a foster family involve?
- How does Changing Futures assist throughout your fostering journey?
What Are The Responsibilities Of A Foster Family?
The fostering journey is not a one-size-fits-all experience, as children and young people have different needs and requirements. However, the general responsibilities of a foster family stay the same across the board. For clarity, they can be placed into these categories…
- Daily Care: The most important responsibility of any foster parents is the daily care of the child or young person in your home. Providing a loving, safe, and secure environment where they can grow and blossom remains priority number one. This involves many things, including ensuring they have a private bedroom, have access to sufficient food, are attending school, are clothed, and are washed, etc. It also involves maintaining records and logs of significant events, progress, and other day-to-day activities.
- Supporting Health And Development: This does not just refer to the child’s physical health, although that is of the utmost importance; it also refers to their emotional and mental health. Children in care often have very complex backgrounds, which may have led to complicated needs. These need to be met, and behaviour needs to be monitored and managed by the foster family.
- Education: As mentioned above, ensuring school attendance is vital, as is keeping up with schoolwork and making sure they are safe and happy in a school, as well as in their home environment. Foster families are expected to support the learning of the child or young person in their care.
- Safety: Safety is important when it comes to any child, in any circumstance and is a major responsibility for any fostering household. You are being trusted with an often vulnerable child or young person who needs to feel safe, secure and protected.
- Advocating For The Child Or Young Person And Facilitating Contact With Their Birth Family: When a child or young person enters your foster family, you, as their foster parents, are responsible for representing the child’s best interests. Whether at school, with health professionals, social workers or the local authority, it is your job to advocate for your child’s best interests. This also applies to promoting and supporting contact between the child in your care and their biological family, whether this be a parent, sibling or extended family member, if it is safe to do so. Often, maintaining a relationship between the birth family and the birth children has been seen to have many benefits.
What Does Building A Foster Family Involve?
Building a foster family is an important part of the fostering process. Matching foster children with a foster carer is no act of coincidence; it is a thoroughly considered and planned process carried out by the fostering services. Ensuring the perfect fit and that every child goes to a loving foster home, whether for the short or long term, is of fundamental importance. This is why potential foster carers go through extensive vetting to ensure they are a good foster carer and a good fit for the child or young person involved. No stone is left unturned when it comes to ensuring a safe, loving family life for vulnerable children and young people!
How Does Changing Futures Assist Throughout Your Fostering Journey?
CFF will be with you at every step of your fostering journey, providing you with an excellent foster family network that involves a supervising social worker always on hand to give you advice, our excellent therapeutic training program, and endless support. By fostering with us, you become part of our family, and we place great importance on looking after each and every foster parent and child or young person in our care.
At Changing Futures Fostering, we’re an agency that provides a fostering service, all about giving our foster parents the information and support they need to really make a difference in a vulnerable child’s life. If you need any more information about the responsibilities of a foster family, or what they involve, or about foster care in general, or if you have any other questions or queries, please click here to contact us, or send us an email at admin@changingfuturesne.co.uk to talk to our brilliant fostering team! Alternatively, feel free to call us on 01429 363 127.