Fostering Children with disabilities
Could you foster Patrice and Annakay?
We are looking for foster carers for Patrice and Annakay. Could you be their new foster carers? Why not find out more?
Children with disabilities ranging from babies to teenagers may be placed with foster carers. Sometimes their parents may feel unable to care for them and these children often need to be placed in long-term foster care. For other families of children with disabilities there might be a need for the child to be placed regularly with foster carers for a few days each week, or each month, to help support them. Supporting both the family of a disabled child as well as the child can be hugely rewarding and is often referred to as respite foster care.
Some of these children have learning difficulties such as those with Down's syndrome whilst others may have been physically disabled from birth or have suffered an accident or injury that has resulted in them being disabled. A child with disabilities is therefore quite a vague term and will often be used to describe a child with a lot of abilities, which gets forgotten in our attempts to classify what they can't, or are less able to do.
In 1998 the Department of Health found that within every 100,00 of the population the incidence of some of these disabilities were:
| with a mild learning difficulty | 2,000 |
| with a moderate / severe learning difficulty | 300 - 400 |
| with significant challenging behaviour | 115 - 360 |
| with additional mental health problems | 115 - 1,200 |
| with impaired hearing | 920 - 960 |
| with epilepsy | 230 - 260 |
| with cerebral palsy | 230 - 260 |
This indicates that children with disabilities are not a rarity within the general population. Nor are they amongst the children for whom fostering placements are being sought.
Many of these children will be able to lead independent or semi-independent lives when they are older, whilst others will continue to need to be cared for throughout their lives.
Foster Carers of children with disabilities need understanding and committment but they do not have to be "very special people". We hear from those who foster these children just how 'ordinary' they are -"We don't have any special powers. We just love children".
We believe that many more foster carers are capable of providing a happy, stable and supportive environment for these children than is often recognised. Many foster carers may not have even thought of considering these children.
For further details please call us on the FREEPHONE line. Many social services departments need to find foster placements for children with disabilities.
The only way to find out if you could foster such a child is to discuss this fully with the social worker concerned. They will be able to give you accurate information about the children that they are currently seeking foster placements for who fall into this category.
