Fostering vs. Parenting: Key Differences You Need to Know
Considering fostering in the UK? Our guide answers key questions about fostering regulations, legal responsibilities, and why foster parenting requires a unique approach.
If you’re thinking about becoming a foster parent in the UK, you likely have a few questions about fostering regulations and what makes fostering different to traditional parenting. Our handy guide will tell you all there is to know about the legal responsibilities of foster parents, and why it’s so important that foster parents take a unique approach to parenting.
How is fostering different from raising your own children?
As a parent of any kind, it is your responsibility to make sure that the children in your care are able to grow and develop in a healthy and safe environment, where they receive lots of love, patience and support.
In your role as a foster parent, you’ll take on the responsibility of caring for a child while their own family is unable to. This means fulfilling their everyday needs, both physical and emotional. Fostering regulations in the UK mean that you’ll also have a range of additional responsibilities, as well as different legal rights to biological or adoptive parents. You will be working with many professionals who will each have some say in how the child is being looked after.
Foster parents also have a very important role in the lives of the children they care for, as they provide children with a unique style of parenting which is tailored to their needs, known as therapeutic parenting. While this may be completely new to you, with ISP, you’ll complete a wide range of training to help you develop these skills, and you won’t be alone either. Let’s discover some of the key things which make fostering different to regular parenting, and why a therapeutic approach to parenting can be so important to help children thrive.
What makes fostering different from traditional parenting?
Legal responsibility.
Legally, foster parents have different rights from biological or adoptive parents. When you have your own child or adopt a child, that child is legally your responsibility. However, when you foster a child, legal responsibility for the young person may remain with their biological parents, or be transferred to their Local Authority. This means that you won’t have the ability to make big decisions about the child’s life, such as whether to move them to a new school or whether or not they should spend time with their biological family. However, your voice will always matter and will be taken into consideration when decisions are made about the child in your care.
Fostering regulations also stipulate that there are some day-to-day things which you’ll need to get permission for as a foster parent. These include taking the child in your care on holiday, having a friend babysit or allowing your child to have a new hairstyle at the hairdressers. There are also rules about boundaries and privacy at home; for example, each of the children in your care must have their own bedroom.
Fostering preparation.
Our foster parents are carefully selected for their fantastic personal qualities, including resilience, empathy and compassion. UK fostering regulations outline that every foster parent in the UK must undergo a series of checks and references before they are approved to foster, including a DBS, health and safety checks on your home, a health assessment with your GP and a pet assessment to ensure that your family pets will be safe around children.
Foster parents also take part in specialised training. As the founders of therapeutic foster care, we offer our own bespoke City & Guilds Assured therapeutic pathway to give foster parents all the skills they need to parent children living with the effects of trauma.
Meetings and appointments.
One of your roles and responsibilities as a foster parent will be to ensure that the child in your care is able to attend important appointments. These could include medical appointments, sessions with a therapist or spending time with their biological family, depending upon their individual needs.
You’ll also need to be available to attend important meetings to do with the care of your young person. These can include appointments with their school and other professionals. We’ll also be on hand to provide you with support via monthly supervision at home with your designated supervising social worker. You’ll also receive visits from your allocated fostering advisor, who will have personal experience of fostering and will be on hand to offer you guidance and support.
Continuous wrap-around support.
When you choose an independent fostering agency such as ours, you will receive a huge package of ongoing support. Here at ISP we provide our foster parents with various tools to help you succeed including access to a local in-house therapist when you need professional support, a 24/7 helpline and up to 22 nights of paid respite per year.
No one in your household will be forgotten when you foster with us. We also provide a range of support for children, both those who you’ll be caring for and your own little ones. This support includes invitations to regular free family events where your family can have fun together while making friends with other fostering families.
Financial support.
Foster parents are unable to claim child benefit for the children they foster. Instead, as a foster parent you will receive a generous tax-free fostering allowance. This allowance serves both as a thank you for the incredible work you do, and also covers the cost of all of the child in your care’s needs.
Other financial benefits which we offer to our foster parents include a holiday allowance per child in your care, an allowance for activities during the school summer holidays, and access to our exclusive discounts platform where you can get bargains on everything from your weekly food shop to family getaways.
Being a pillar of support to a child in need.
Many of the children who you may care for as a foster parent have had incredibly difficult experiences in their young lives and may have missed out on so much of what helps a child to thrive and be themselves, including love, nurturing, safety and support. As a foster parent, you’ll have the privilege of guiding a child through their healing journey, being gentle and empathetic in your every interaction to help them to build trust in adults, and to help them feel safe in the world. We’ll explore more of this aspect of fostering below, as we learn more about therapeutic parenting.
A foster parent’s unique approach to parenting
One of the main things which differentiates fostering from traditional parenting is the need for unique style of parenting. Many children who are being cared for by a foster family live with trauma. Trauma can result from a range of experiences which are common for children in foster care, including experiencing neglect or abuse, witnessing domestic abuse, or losing a parent or guardian.
When a child is exposed to these kinds of events, it can impact their brain development. Trauma can affect development in key areas, such as a child’s ability to regulate their emotions, make decisions, empathise with others and understand the consequences of their actions. Children who live with trauma may be in a constant state of high alert. This continual level of heightened alertness can override logical thinking. The primal flight, fight or freeze response can take over, meaning that a child may feel threatened even when they are in a completely safe environment.
Their experiences may also make it challenging for them to trust the adults around them. They may even put up barriers or self-sabotage to regain a sense of control or protect themselves from being hurt. Because of this, a delicate and empathetic approach is needed for children who live with trauma.
Watch our video above to understand more about the impact of trauma on a child’s developing brain.
Why traditional parenting advice doesn’t work for every child in care
Because of the impact which trauma has on a child’s brain, their understanding of the world, and their relationships, well-recognised parenting methods often aren’t particularly effective for children who are living with trauma.
If you’ve raised your own children before fostering, you may have found success with popular methods such as ‘the naughty step’, ignoring a child while they are in time-out, or withholding desert until they’ve finished their dinner. These methods often work well for children who have had a healthy and secure upbringing as they are used to stability and know that they can rely upon their caregivers even while being disciplined.
However, for children who have experienced difficult circumstances, methods such as these can be unhelpful and counterproductive. They may not have that same safe and secure understanding of the world around them, and traditional approaches to discipline can leave them feeling overwhelmed by shame. They may even have the effect of triggering or retraumatising the child.
Therapeutic parenting techniques in action
Let’s consider an example of how different children might react to the same parenting styles and techniques.
Scenario: The child is refusing to eat their lunch. As a consequence, their caregiver tells them that they won’t be able to enjoy dessert with the rest of the family that evening.
Child A: Child A has a secure relationship with their caregiver and has never had to worry about missing a meal. They know that, even if they cannot enjoy dessert this evening, they won’t go hungry and that dinner will be waiting for them, followed by breakfast the next day. With this foundation of safety to build off, they are able to see the logic behind the consequences of their choice. They will be able to develop a healthy understanding of the consequences of their own actions and change their behaviour appropriately over time.
Child B: Child B is living with a foster family and has come from a home environment where they were neglected. Back at home they faced insecurity about food and hunger was used as a form of punishment. By withholding food from child B, their anxiety around food is heightened, and it is reinforced to them that their foster parent cannot be trusted to fulfil their basic needs. They may believe that their food is being taken away to punish them, and that the love and care they receive from their foster parent is conditional. Rather than providing an opportunity for the child to learn, this approach might trigger them into a flight, fright or freeze response.
An alternative approach for child B
By using the skills learned through our therapeutic training, you as a foster parent will be equipped with the knowledge that having negative consequences associated with food could have a negative impact on the relationship and trust they may have begun to build with you. Instead, be curious as to why they’re avoiding eating their lunch; are they perhaps feeling anxious? Could it be that they’re experiencing sensory issues around the texture of the food, or simply that the food is very different from what they were used to eating at home?
Could you make the process more fun and engaging, such as by involving them in preparing the food or using creative methods to make the meal more enticing? Having choices available can help a child feel more secure and give them a little control. Encouraging them to explore rather than being restrictive.
The live-changing impact of therapeutic fostering
At ISP we’re proud to be the founders of therapeutic foster care, and we have a deep understanding of the need to ensure that children receive care which takes their past experiences into account. By adapting our approach to parenting, we can ensure as foster parents that we build relationships with children which are based upon trust and empathy.
We hope our guide to fostering regulations and the importance of therapeutic fostering has been helpful in learning more about what it takes to be a foster parent in the UK. If you believe that you’re ready to welcome a child into your home, we encourage you to get in touch with a member of our team, who’ll be able to tell you all there is to know about becoming a foster parent with ISP.
Ready to learn more? Download our guide to fostering for beginners.
