3 Tips to Make Your Foster Kids Feel Welcome
Being a foster parent can be difficult at times but it’s almost always harder for the children, no matter their age. Therefore, fostering is not just a paid profession, it’s also an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to help vulnerable children when they need it the most. Keeping that goal in mind, just go through the following suggestions and see if any of them can’t bring a smile to the faces of the children in your care.
Personalise their Room
There are different types of fostering services that range from just providing an emergency shelter for the night to an endangered child, to caring for children until they reach adulthood. If you live in London and wish to know more about the available options for foster care, visit orangegrovefostercare.co.uk.
The types of foster care opportunities available are important here because you can’t exactly personalise a room for emergency/urgent fostering duty. The room should still be prepared in advance though, based on what little information has been given to you, how much time you have, and their age bracket.
Personalisation holds a lot more importance if the child is going to be with your family for a while. You will not just have more time, information, and reason to prepare a room beforehand, but you will also be able to do more later. Interact with your foster child and see what they would like to see or do in their room. Set things up in their room together to make them feel like a welcome addition to your own family.
Rules Vs Laws
Lay down some ground rules from the beginning but don’t make any of it sound like you are setting up laws. Foster children generally have some kind of trauma in their background. Some may come from troubled homes with angry and abusive guardians.
Try not to make their stay with you feel like a prison for the child. Establishing discipline is fine, but don’t be harsh about it. Customise your ground rules if needed, because making them feel safe and secured is the primary objective and a legal requirement.
Give the Child Some Time to Adjust
Providing long term foster care to children requires patience on both ends, but you will need to be the one to have it most as an adult. Now, it is downright impossible to predict the personality of a child without knowing anything about them in advance. Therefore, it’s very important that you take some time yourself to get to know them, while also giving them the time they need to adjust themselves to the new home environment. Make them feel that it’s okay for them to join in your family activities as another member, but they are free to do so at their own pace.
Welcoming foster children home should always be about inviting them and never enlisting them. Mandatory family activities do very little to create bonds here, unless they are activities that everyone involved is enthusiastic about. Once they are ready though, you should definitely plan some family activities together to naturally form that bond.
