by Johanna Sugrue

Created on: July 28, 2008

There are many kinds of fostering, but I want you to seriously consider if fostering children and young people with complex and multiple emotional and other needs is for you? These children and young people, are the most demanding and hardest to place of children, yet they have the greatest need for families and a stable enviroment.

You really want to make a difference? You think any child can be helped if you just love them enough? Wrong! Mention the 'L' word to these children and your in deep trouble. Think about it. What does has love meant to them? In the worst case, its often a prelude to sexual abuse. "I love you." Therefore I can abuse you. For others, it means nothing more then a precurser to further abandonment and rejection.

Having been effectively abandoned by birth parents, who have failed to love, protect and cherish them, they then go on through multiple placements to be told they are loved and ultimately abandoned again. Not neccessarily the carer's fault, they just couldn't cope with the child's behaviour.

Then there is the the cruelest abandonment of all, a failed adoption. We are your 'forever family.' Having painted an image of the perfect nuclear family to this damaged and needy child, the adoptive parents, often a desperate and infertile couple, having no idea of the complex needs of the placed child will after failing to generate feelings of love and attachment in their adoptive child, hand them back to the care system. Worse still, they may keep the the adoptive child's siblings, usually younger, less damaged and better able to return the affections of the adoptive parents.

Love for these children is often a distorted and abusive word and has no real currency in their life, socan you set it aside? What they will see is the way you act, what you say and do. Can you make a promise and keep it? CaN you praise, without being over effusive, or they won't believe you. Will you always tell the truth, no matter how difficult? These children are tougher then you think, they've had to be. Can you explain everything in words they understand, making them feel more secure. Can you live with a child knowing they may never love you, or possibly even like you?

Can you avoid pity? They'll trade on it, it's one of the major tools they have to manipulate you and believe me, they will. are you able to tolerate some extreme and testing behaviour? Think of the worst, then expand it. In the normal range is running away, drinking, drug taking and crime. Are you

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