Fostering & your family
When considering fostering as a career option, the impact on your own family (or plans to have a family of your own) is quite rightly a huge part of that decision-making process.
How would your children react to a new person in the house?
How will you manage your routines to include another child/children?
Are they prepared to share you with another young person?
How will you manage to foster with a young family?
No two fostering journeys are the same, as no two children are the same. Once you are approved to become a foster parent we will take careful consideration of any children we ‘match’ with you and place in your home.
Everyone in your home (even your pets) is a part of the journey. For birth children, fostering can be a valuable learning experience as they form strong bonds and lifelong friendships with their new family members. It can be a sad time for them when a placement ends, but it doesn’t mean the end of the relationship.
Families often keep in touch with their foster children long after their placement ends.
Scale up!
Many people who have thought about becoming foster carers worry about the uncertainty of how long a child will stay with them. Whilst very little in foster care is certain, something we can do is scale families into the role through ‘Short-break’ fostering.
Formerly, ‘Respite’ care this form of care is vital for families and the children in their care. We’ll partner our foster families with short-break specialists who get to know eachother closely so that children have familiar faces when carers need a well-deserved break.
This role provides some certainty to carers who may need more confidence or flexbility in their role.
If you would like to get in touch and become a short break carer with The CFT, get in touch!
Resources, support & events
Birth children are critical to the fostering experience, their participation cannot be underestimated. Given this, we include them in everything we do at The CFT – ensuring they’re prepared and their relationships develop strong ties goes a long way to making a successful foster family.
We put on events specifically for birth children to meet other young people with similar experiences, this also provides an opportunity for us as an organisation to understand how they are responding to the new family member/s, making sure we are doing everything we can to make them comfortable – learning all the time what we can do to make families a success.
Make an enquiry!
Become a foster carer