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.
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.
Plus, you have to have in the back of your mind that you are doing this as a temporary fix. Children don’t necessarily go back to their biological family – our sons have stayed with us – but the idea is to reunite children with their parents. ("Staying Put" is a policy in England that lets people stay with their former foster carers after turning 18, as opposed to moving out into supported accommodation).
Fostering was a big part of my own story. I don’t remember the first part of my life well, but I remember living with my auntie (my mum’s sister). I didn’t know she wasn’t my biological mother until I was six. She was a mother figure to me all her life. Unfortunately she passed away last year, but she had all our kids call her grandma.
When I was a child, my mum wasn't able to handle what came with parenting. She could however work, so she worked and bought money in, while I was loved on, looked after and cared for. To me, the best type of parenting is when a mother is well, and if our community can support that mother to be well – to parent – that's the best goal.
I’m Ghanaian and my husband is Jamaican, and a lot of our cultures are parallel. When I went back to live with my mum after six months being fostered by my auntie, I spent all my holidays with my cousins, and my mum and another auntie would share the parenting. Every single woman in the house, we would call ‘auntie’ whether they were biologically related to us or not.
Ultimately, fostering has made me who I am today. I have a lot of love, because I have seen a lot of love. Fostering felt like part of my blood or DNA. As a foster parent, the whole concept of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’: I breathe and walk it every day with my husband.
And if you speak to my daughter, her world is so broad now because she doesn't have a closed ideology of what the world looks like – she's very accepting and empathetic. I am very proud of her. We've had children of different heritage come and live with us, and she calls them her brothers and sisters. Love is love for her.
When people find out that we foster, some people say , ‘I’d love to foster too; it'd be amazing to foster one day’. People always put it as something to do ‘one day’, but I would like to challenge that. We did it the other way around. We were foster parents before we became biological parents. When I was younger, I had all the energy in the world, and the mind to be able to adapt and learn. So if someone is considering it, and maybe hasn’t had a child or their own yet, I would say, go for it. It may be the best decision you ever make, too.
Claudia fosters through the Foster Care Associates, part of Polaris.
