Whether you have had experience looking after children or not, it can feel like an intimidating prospect to become a foster carer.
Perhaps you’re keen to give back to your community and believe you can offer a child a place of safety. But you’re concerned you don’t have the skills needed to give a child in a care the support they need to thrive.
In this blog post, we want to highlight some transferable skills that we are confident you will have gained in work and life, and show that being a good foster carer is mostly about care, consistency, and persistence.
transferable skills from employment
In previous roles, have you worked alongside other people? If you’ve been part of a team or held management positions, you will have gained a myriad of people skills that will enable you to care for a child well. Such as, negotiation, communication, empathy, and conflict resolution.
Have you needed to do paperwork, write reports or other documents/articles, or recordings? Fostering requires some recording and reporting and basic digital skills to send reports digitally. It is nothing complex and mostly asks you to record events that have happened in a factual manner. We will support you to understand how to do digital recording and keep good logs through training.
Have you had to manage stress in your work? With deadline pressures, or high expectations? You won’t have a scary manager breathing down your neck as a foster carer! But you may have days where it feels full on and there are stressful moments. Especially at the start of a new placement when it can take some time to build trust and for the child to settle. The strategies and skills you will have learned in your work to manage the stressful days and keep calm will come to the fore if you foster.
the main skills needed for foster care
We don’t expect our foster carers to have had experience looking after children before, either as parents or grandparents. We provide good quality training and the support to our carers is available 24/7 so you are never on your own as a foster carer.
The main area that you need to be skilled in is listening and supporting and caring about a child. You also need to be willing to learn. Fostering is about carers and children learning from each other. You may have been on very different paths up until the moment the placement begins, but you will hopefully have the same goals and it’s about working out how to reach them together.
a rewarding role
It is extremely rewarding to see a child thrive as a result of the care and stability you have offered. A child will achieve amazing outcomes simply from knowing that there are safe strong adults to support them in their life. And with that strength they develop confidence and learn to thrive.
Finally, it’s important to say again that with fostering there is a team around the child, you’re never on your own.
If you have a specific question about being a foster carer, you can ask it using the chat function on our agency page. Or give us a call on 01903 522966.