While many children in foster care have siblings, all too often they are separated. Yet studies have shown numerous advantages to these children when they are kept together.
Any foster child has a lot to adjust to in a new foster home. Children have already been separated from their parents. This feeling of loss is exacerbated when they are also parted from the siblings they have grown up with. Additionally, it may result in greater behavioural difficulties.
The isolation increases insecurity and makes it more difficult for foster children to form new relationships and experience attachment. This happens because they have been ripped from their earlier attachments and no longer trust that people will stay in their lives. As adults, they will not know how to form families of their own.
Occasionally, there may be valid reasons to separate siblings. Friction may exist between the children as a result of early family experiences meaning they do not get along. One child may have specific needs, such as a disability.
However, siblings are usually separated because there are insufficient foster parents who are able to foster siblings because they do not have the space to accommodate them in their homes. Keeping siblings together is ideal.
Here we look at the advantages of fostering siblings.
Faster Adjustment to the Foster Home
An older sibling can provide foster parents with useful information that makes the adjustment to the new home easier.
For example, the way they like their food, that they need a night light to sleep, and the clothes and toys they preferred at home. The older sibling can help the fosters put the younger ones to bed so that they feel less strange.
The older sibling immediately feels that they have an important role to play in the new foster family, which gives them a sense of purpose. This need to speak out on behalf of their siblings opens up the channels of communication. The younger sibling witnesses this relationship and is able to trust that they will be cared for.
There are fewer behavioural problems and emotional outbursts when siblings are placed together in a foster home. These children have experienced shared trauma and comforted each other through it, which has built a deep bond. As long as they are together, they have each other.
Better Mental Well-Being
Being taken away from their primary families has pulled the rug out from under these children’s feet. They don’t know what to expect in the foster home or how they will be treated.
New schools may be on the cards, which means feeling further isolated as they are separated from their friends and join a new school later in the year by which time other kids have established friendships. This makes it hard to break into a group.
Additionally, they fear they will never see their parents again. This cuts to the roots of their mental well-being. Being placed with a sibling provides a child with continuity and an already-formed bond. This relationship is the only security they feel.
Short term fostering could be as short as one or two days when a child has to be removed from the family home as an emergency situation.
In other cases, it generally runs for a few months to two years until the child receives a permanent placement. Speak to fosteringpeople.co.uk if you feel you could be foster parents to siblings.
Restoring Families
A foster child wants, above all, to be reunited with their biological parent(s). Living in the foster home encourages the biological parents to strive for being able to provide their children with a stable home again. They only have to visit their kids at one location.
Fostering siblings brings double the joy to everyone.
