Foster carers & children asked - we listened

"We were worried that something was causing a 14 year old girl’s behaviour to change so much. She was nervous, edgy and angry, and would not say why. We tried to talk to her about this but got nowhere.

We looked through her search history, she always dropped sites down on the tool bar of her laptop if we came into the room. We found she was looking at pages where people talked about self-harm and how to hide it. We got her some help as soon as we could and she agreed to accept it."

"I have their passwords and have set parental filters, we only allow age appropriate content."

"A lot of our looked after children would go through this on their own and they wouldn't tell anybody. That was what happened to us with the girls that we were looking after. They didn't tell anybody because it was just the norm. It was what was going on. And it's about breaking that. It's about breaking that misconception that this is acceptable, and this is OK. We tried to model a healthy relationship and talk about it."

"I speak to them consistently and raise awareness as well as make sure I’m aware of all online platforms they may be using."

"I check their social media and ask questions, keep communication open."

"We’ve actually been able to drip feed him the technology because he came to us as a small boy. He is doing well and still loves his books."

"I’d speak to my link worker for advice or ask my adult children about it."

"We tried changing the way we approached it to show it was because we cared if she was OK or not. She said in the end that this was the first time anyone had cared if she was safe. So, in the end she was OK with it."

"I told her it wasn't her fault. She was a child. It was the adult that was doing whatever was done. It was the adult's fault. It wasn't her fault and that she had her childhood taken away from her at an early age. And that is why it made her do the wrong decisions when it comes to boys, because she thinks she has to. She thought she had to act a certain way to get a boyfriend because she thought that's what boys wanted."

"I basically sat her down, because she was old enough at the time to listen to me. I came from an abusive childhood. That's why I went into fostering myself. So I explained to her about the control my father had over all of us and my mother -about the domestic violence, about the poverty. And I explained to her that for my mother, that wasn't a positive, loving relationship. However, it didn't make my father a bad person. My father had been parented similar. I said just some people are not good parents. It doesn't make them bad people. Parenting doesn't come with a manual. She visits me now with her own child."