Foster Carers in Lambeth?
Foster carers provide vulnerable children and young people with a safe and loving home when they’re unable to live with their parents. For a lot of them, this can be their first positive experience of family life.
There’s a lot of reasons why a young person might end up in care. It could be because of an illness within the family, problems at home, or a situation where their welfare is in danger. Unfortunately, many will have experienced neglect and physical, emotional or sexual abuse.
We believe that every young person deserves the chance to be part of a family and to feel safe and valued. That’s why we’re urgently looking for new foster carers in the Lambeth area.
A 2015-2016 Ofsted enquiry found that there were approximately 115 children in need of a foster home in Lambeth, but only 103 foster carers in the local area, placed with the LA. Since then the number of children in need of care has continued to rise. Now, as in many other parts of the UK, there are simply not enough carers to meet this growing crisis.
If we cannot find new carers these vulnerable young people are likely to be placed out into residential care or forced to relocate to another part of the country, far away from their friends and family.
If you’re able to help, and if you have a spare bedroom as well as the time, commitment and dedication to providing the care these children need, we’d love to hear from you.
By choosing to foster in Lambeth you could have a transformative effect on the lives of vulnerable young people by helping to ensure that they can stay in the local area, continue at their existing school, keep in touch with their friends and hopefully help facilitate arrangements for them to return to their birth family.
3 Essential Tips for New Foster Carers
With more than 20 years of experience, we understand that fostering can sometimes be a challenging career. That’s why our team are always on hand to help answer any questions you might have. Together we’ve come up with three top tips for those new to the role:
Learn how to manage the behaviours of challenging children
Because of their past experiences of abuse and neglect, it’s important to be able to manage children’s behaviour without using unreasonable disciplinary methods. All form of punishment which withholds care, or causes serious discomfort is not OK.
It’s important to remain as patient and empathetic as possible. Obviously, this can sometimes be difficult if you’re stressed out or if their behaviour is particularly challenging. But remember, it’s your responsibility as their carer to develop a relationship with them and being overzealous in disciplining them can destroy the bond you’re trying to build.
Make sure your family supports your decision
Before becoming a foster carer, it’s important that your immediate family are on board with your decision. It’s also important to understand that becoming a foster carer will affect your children too—if you’ve got children that is, single people and couples, straight or gay without children can foster too!
It’s important to prepare them for the changes in their lives. Read all the blogs you can and if after some time you decide that foster care isn’t for you right now, there are always other ways to support children in care.
Don’t be afraid to seek help
Just like the children in your care, you’ll also need support. It’s important not to be ashamed of seeking help—there’s no stigma. Professionals associated with agencies recognise how difficult this career can be. Some agencies even offer free therapy sessions that can help with calming strategies and encouragement.
But it’s important to remember that the level of support available to carers varies from agency to agency. We understand that finding the right agency for you can be a time-consuming and stressful process—and one that often discourages people from taking their interest further. That’s why we’ve set up Simply Fostering. Using our free agency matching service, we’ll pair you with the agencies offering the best support packages in your area.
There is a desperate need for more people to foster and to help with the year on year shortage. For more information about UK allowances check out our Foster carers allowances and rewards article.
So whether you’ve been considering fostering for some time, or if you’d just like to learn more about fostering in Lambeth, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us by completing an online fostering eligibility quiz.