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If so you may be able to live with these children.

Have you a partner, is your relationship, strong enough to cope with the onslaught, living with a child that seeks to divide and conquer. Alternatively as a single parent, accept that you may have weeks of sleepless nights? Yet be expected to function on a daily basis, without the support of a partner who could cover for you providing supervision and care when you need a rest?

Are you able to advocate for the child, dealing with some Social Workers, who are unable or unwilling to provide support or services for the child? Cope with issues at school and build good working relationships with all professionals in the child's life?

Are you able to accept that the child may only allow you to provide, a place of safety, food warmth and a bed and at in the end your role may simply be "To do no more harm?" The child may then turn around and reject you in the most hurtful and horrible way. This could include making serious false allegations. Are you prepared for an ending of this kind?

Can you deal with some difficult, manipulative and sometimes aggressive birth families, often seeking to undermine the placement, with no interest in their child making a success of their lives? Can you bite your tongue, remembering this child has lifelong ties to their birth family with you being percieved as just another resting place on their way out of care?

If you are an ordinary person, prepared to do an extrodinary job, accepting that you can't change or 'cure' every child coming into your home, then maybe this task is for you. If you can celebrate small changes, be part of the "good" things that this child has experienced, then you may have found your role in life.

Finally, whilst much of the above is negative and frightening, as a foster carer working with children like this, I have seen love blossom like a flower in an arid desert from the most unexpected sources. Children changing and growing, thriving in an educational enviroment, when expected by most to fail. Relationships forming with a child with a long history of failed placements. There is always hope and behind our work love, but it must at all times be tempered by pragmatism and reality.

The author is a full-time Foster Carer in the UK. She has fostered for the last ten years specialising in children and young people, deemed as "difficult to place." Most, though not all the placements have been teenagers. During this time she has been a single parent, bringing bringing up three daughter alongside her foster children.

Learn more about this author, Johanna Sugrue.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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