Right Age

[PearLover]

We have our own children, aged 15 and 10. We have been looking at fostering and/or adoption for years now. We have held off due to every time we researched the advice was always not with young children. In your experienced opinions, are the children we have old enough now to consider fostering or would you wait until they left home? It's something we'd love to do, and our children are really up for it as well, but I'm consious they're not old enough to make that decision, and we're probably still wearing rose-tinted lenses! TIA

Yes I think they’re old enough, as long as you foster a much younger child who they can help look after rather than be a ‘peer’ of. My daughter was 7 when we fostered a baby and she loved having the baby with us.

We are foster carers and we have two of our biological children, a 4 month old and a 6 year old. It's tiring but we also foster. It us doable but we are very picky with the referrals we get. You could offer respite only to start with to see how you and your family are finding it prior to committing to a short or long term placement. Just some advice that you can take if you want.. one of your children is a 15 yo so I would recommend steering clear of teenagers for fostering and sticking to younger kids up to the age of 10. That's for many reasons that's best not to explain here.