How did your own child/ren react to you becoming a foster parent?

[Anngeree]

I'm thinking of becoming a foster parent i'm waiting to find out when I get my first home visit to discuss this in more detail. I'm a qualified nursery nurse with experience of support work and fostering is something i've wanted to do for years even before I had my own child. I'm just wondering if theres any foster parents out there who had their own young child/ren when they began fostering. How did they react to sharing Mum's time & attention with another child? Has it had a positive influence on them? My Ds is 6 think he'll adapt fairly well as he is a happy friendly little boy but this will be the first time he'll have to share me!

Hi Ann, our 3 dc's were 10 7 and 4 when we began fostering and we found that including them as much as possible in the whole assessment procedure helped them.

They were given the opportunity to ask questions whenever we had a home visit and boy did they ask questions

Their main concern, we discovered, was that we would love the fc's more than them. It gave us the chance to reassure them and they were as pleased as us when we were approved.

Once the fc's began to arrive our dc's were fantastic. We often found that the fc's would trust our dc's before they became at ease with us.

All in all I believe the experience our dc's have had has been positive for them.

Good luck with your fostering

we have just been approved for fostering, and like you we have ds whi is also 6. We involved him in every part of the process and talked about it extensivly with him before we applied in the first place.

He is so excited, has asked lots of questions about the fc (they have one in mind for us). he has made lots of preparations, all his own doing, for whee the fc comes.

I think the thing he was most excited about was the fact all of our attetion wouldn't be on him! in fact he told our social worker that he would like a girl so i could go shop for her to bu lots of clothes as he is fed up with me always buying him stuff! know and he thought it was good that th e fc would need a bit more of my time (we are having a young person with disabilities) because he wanteed to be more independent! Huh out the mouth of babes!

Thanks for your replies they've made me even more sure i'm doing the right thing. My initial home visit is next Thu!

good luck.+