After being fostered for six months in my own childhood, I knew from a very early age that I wanted to foster, too. Fostering was what I was going to do and the person I was marrying had to be on board with it.
I got married at 26 and two years later we said, ‘This is what we’re doing to start the process’. I decided to reach out to an agency called Foster Care Associates and they walked me through it. Vetting took about six months, and eventually, we fostered two boys, brothers, who are now 22 and 18 and have stayed in our household. Then I had my biological daughter, who’s now 11, and we’ve since fostered three-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.
What surprised me the most about fostering was discovering the resilience of children. You get to witness the smallest of victories. For example, the twins have been with three other families. They were just two years old and when they came, the boy was non-verbal.
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I started learning a bit of Makaton [a super-simple form of sign language] to try and find ways to communicate with him. Within four days, this boy was talking. That’s all it took. It just completely blew our minds.
Today he’s still a little bit behind his sister in terms of speech development, but he’s going in strides and he’s talking all the time. With just a little bit of routine and love, the things that a parent does can completely turn around a child.
Claudia Myrie
The biggest challenge for me is, you have to realise that they’re not your biological children. When you have known your child all their life, you have oversight as to why your child may be behaving in a particular way. But with foster children, as much as you may get a lot of information, no one truly knows what’s going on with them. Luckily as a foster parent, I get free access to mandatory training as well as modules on things like how children form identity and sibling rivalry – I’ve done about 15 modules in the last six months.
With foster children there’s also a lot more supervision. For example, my daughter went for a sleepover the other day and it wasn’t a big decision for us to make. But for my foster sons, a social worker would need to have got involved and made the decision as well as us. Holidays need risk assessment and approval as well. Luckily it’s not difficult – it’s just protocol.