has anyone fostered via the council teenagers?

libbyc3

as per ignoring social workers advice - would you take advice on pigeon fancying from someone who had never done it!? Whilst most social workers are should be able to advise on the rules / regs and guidlines of fostering, the actual experience of living day to day with damaged children is outside of their experience, so you are far better turning to other carers to 'offload' on and using social workers for official 'am I / is this allowed questions.
As borne out by the margretclare's experience of a social worker telling she should not change her life?!
I also am a firm believer that my 2 youngest children give and recieve so much from being part of fostering family. They understand that the young people living with us cannot be looked after by their mummy and daddy and as a result sometimes this makes them cross and upset. They accept this and are very intuative as to the fostered child's ups and downs. everything is explained to them in a simplistic way and my supporting social worker takes time to make sure all 4 of my kids are ok with any given situation - although I have said before I'm lucky with the social worker i currently have.
All the children of carers I know say as much as sometimes things drive them mad they would not want they're parents to stop fostering.

RevTimms

You are perfectly right libby. We used Social Services for the "Can I do this etc type question".
For the others, we relied on our own judgements.
eg Should I change, or should I be flexible, pragmatic, and non-judgemental? We used our own common sense and conscience, just like you.

margaretclare

I think someone has got the wrong idea about me. I did not 'expect' the children to change for me. It was mainly my husband's project - he was there all the time, I had a responsible job and I was mainly there as back-up to him. He was the one with the hands-on experience of that age-group because of his on-going involvement with Sea Cadets.

Basically we had few expectations and we certainly didn't think there'd be any great change as a result of anything that we did or said. All we did - all we were asked to do - was to provide a stable home environment that was different from what they'd come from. Well, we certainly did that, and as Oldernotwiser says, it was a 'place of safety'.

Also, at that time because I was the only earner, we couldn't have afforded TV sets for everyone's room - it was just becoming the norm but wasn't quite yet.

Oh yes, we could have changed our lives to suit - according to the 'not a proper family' comment, I could have given up my career to become a SAHM, which I've never been! And then what would we have lived on?

Another comment that came our way about living in the country was that one of the girls expected to have her own pony!! To hear about 'living in the country', when you come from an inner-city council estate, apparently evokes these kind of images.

However, it is pointless my going on with this discussion, because there are certain people who are determined not to understand what I say.

Oldernotwiser

Whilst I would agree that feedback from other foster carers is very important, not everybody has access to that kind of network. I also think that if you were new to this you would expect to be able to take a social worker's advice and we were very much given to expect that we did it their way or not at all.

I really feel that if children were given as much preparation for placements as the foster carers are, there would be far fewer problems. As Margaret says, many have completely unrealistic expectations, often given to them by social workers to make them react more favourably to the idea of being fostered.

Libby, I'm glad that your children are doing well in a fostering situation; having been subjected to physical and emotional abuse myself by the 2 teenagers I've fostered I wouldn't want to risk it with young ones of my own. We even had to consider rehoming pets after one of our cats was thrown from an upstairs window; it could so easily have been a toddler.