Joanne's story

One day, the circumstances of a little girl she knew fast-forwarded her plans. Nearly 22 years of fostering later, Joanne spoke with Foster with North East to look back on the twists, turns, challenges and rewards of a role she says still teaches her something new each day and the joy she feels at helping keep families together. 

Your home could be the right home, right now

Something that comes up a lot when we speak to potential foster carers is the idea that you should have a sense of feeling ready to foster. We know that opening up your family and sharing your home with a child or young person can bring big changes. While Joanne had fostering in mind from a young age, she ended up stepping into fostering and feeling those changes much sooner than she expected. Then she never looked back.

Joanne explained: "I was brought up on a very deprived council estate and my mum worked in the community, so we've always been helping people that are in need. And it's just something that I wanted to do. I've always wanted to do it, really, and then I got married and my partner wanted to do it.

"I had my children very young, my birth children. I had them when I was 18. I've got three birth children (two sons and a daughter). At the time I started fostering, I had two children and a family friend had her children removed. We'd been looking after the youngest of those, and so social services placed her in our care temporarily, which ended up as a permanent fostering placement. That kind of snowballed us into fostering, really, because we were waiting till our own were a bit older.

"We ended up with children aged three, four, five and a seven-year-old in the house. So we thought, well, we're doing it now, we may as well just continue! That made our minds up, really, that we were just going to do it from then onwards. I think at the time when it came to it, it was a fit for us. We were doing it. We wanted our children to be older, to be able to manage it. But actually, my children are now foster carers themselves, and the experience has made them into such kind adults.

"I think it helps kind of nurture them into being more caring adults. I think they've all gone into care professions of some kind. My younger son's a nurse, my daughter was a social worker and my older son did teaching and is now a foster carer."

 

The benefits of fostering family life

As a foster carer approved to look after children aged 0-18 years, Joanne has welcomed babies, young children with additional needs, sibling groups and mums with babies into her home. We spoke to her during a rare quiet moment while her littlest, a child of 18 months, was at nursery. Joanne said:

I've learned a lot of information, it's taught me so much, and it's meant I could be at home with my children as they were growing up. You learn something new every single day, everything's changing, the kids will come home and tell you stuff. It's such a nice feeling, it's just a great joy to do.

Asked about how she balances family life and fostering, Joanne said that fostering had opened up different experiences for her, her children and the young people she looks after: "If I didn't foster, I'd have to work full time and if I worked full time, then we wouldn't be able to do half the stuff that we could do as a fostering family, really. A lot of our socialising we do as a family, and because my adult children foster, that's easy because we just do it together."

She also talks about the importance of matching and considering the needs of children in the home at different times, keeping their needs in mind and involving them in the process.

"We kind of see where they're at at that time and decide to go from there, really."

 

Fostering as a single foster carer

Although Joanne started her fostering journey as part of a couple, when she divorced a few years ago, she had no doubts about continuing to foster as a single person.

"I was always the main carer when we fostered and I had to be kind of briefly reassessed to make sure I was able to manage placements, but there was nothing that would mean I wouldn't do it."

Asked what advice she'd give others considering fostering, particularly as single parents, Joanne said:

One of my friends always says, give it a year, if you like, and see if it makes a difference, because you can always stop if it doesn't. I think you'll find once you've started, you won't stop it. You kind of get hooked. But, yeah, just give it a try. Don't rule yourself out for having children, having no children, being on your own, being in a couple, it doesn't make any difference to fostering. If you've got time and patience, you can do it, without a doubt.

 

Ending the cycle of family breakdown

In most circumstances, the hope is a child in foster care will be able to safely return home. Asked about the challenges of foster care, Joanne talks about the heartbreak that happens when this isn't possible. However, she went on to talk about the sense of reward and hope she feels in particular, when she's able to give mums and babies a chance of staying together through parent and child fostering. She is currently helping a 15-year-old learn the routines and roles of parenting. Joanne is approved for parent and child placements, which is a specialist type of foster care.

"Parent and child fostering is different because it's not hands-on for me, where normally I'd be the one that's doing all of the care. It's kind of trying to step back and show them how to parent their child rather than me parenting that child. So sometimes you kind of have to step back and let them learn because you can't take over. That's quite difficult and it is quite intensive. I suppose it depends on the parent and child that you've got in. I've had very young ones that basically just needed another mum to kind of overlook them and make sure they understand what they were doing and routines, if they haven't had that [themselves]."

Joanne says she's able to relate to them as a former young mum herself, and help them make the transition into parenting.

"[I can say] I was in a similar position to you, where I was being judged for being young but the kids have all grown up and they're well adjusted and they're happy and you can get there, it's just trickier and harder. You've just got to prove people wrong and that's what I say to them, that's ultimately what you've got to do, you can do it."

"Then we've got other parents that have to be fully supervised because of neglect of previous children and those placements are hard because it's a lot to have to have somebody with you. 24/7 is quite tricky.

"But if it works and you can do it, you've helped one parent and child to then go and live safely and stay together. You have hope that you've broken a cycle of family breakdowns."

Find out more

If you think you could offer your home to vulnerable babies, children and young people in the North East why not complete our online enquiry form and one of our Foster with North East team will be in touch.