The end of the year is a time of reflection, so praise yourself for the difference you have made to children’s lives, this year.
Opening your hearts and homes to children and young people can impact on you both personally and professionally. Often, without you being fully aware. Maintaining your own emotional wellbeing and energy is critical to managing those stresses. Set some personal targets for 2025. Think about ways to sustain your emotional wellbeing and energy.
Be aware of stress. Being a foster carer is demanding and emotionally draining. The challenges come from many angles – behaviours; multiple appointments/ meetings/professionals visiting the home; school issues; contact; placement beginnings and ends; complaints and allegations; isolation; social workers …. and just the sheer volume of things you have to do. There is a risk that all those stresses can lead to:
– general fatigue, lethargy, complacency. This can result in a loss of positivity, enthusiasm and motivation
– compassion fatigue. This is a physical and emotional condition, characterised by a gradual lessening of compassion over time
– secondary trauma. You can experience trauma from hearing about children’s history
– burnout. Feelings of physical and emotional exhaustion, anger, frustration, hopelessness and/or depression, which develop over time.
Don’t under-estimate the impact of stress on our brain functioning. We can quickly lose our emotional control and sensitivity, and our ability to perform our professional roles well.
As a foster carer, stresses can build up to toxic levels without you realising. You may be too busy, too tired, too absorbed with a child to step back a little and think about how everything is impacting on you. Think about how you’re feeling, and how your care and professionalism may have been affected. Look out for the below changes:
– emotional wellbeing – low mood, anxious, angry, cynical, negative, irritable, depressed, feeling blamed, judged and alone, attacking and blaming others, ineffectual and powerless
– physical wellbeing – exhaustion, no energy, headaches, backache, digestive problems, high blood pressure, weakened immune system, insomnia
– behavioural changes – inability to manage our own emotions, which can spill out in our responses to others, increase in self soothing behaviour ie food, drink, drugs; withdrawing from social interaction, tensions in personal relationships
– quality of care – emotionally insensitive, unavailable, and unempathetic – meeting only basic needs , and impacting negatively on the child.
– motivation, energy and capacity to meet professional requirements – when our wellbeing is low, tasks can seem daunting or too much effort. As a result, we may fall into habits of delaying or avoiding certain tasks.
Commonly, this often starts with logs, training, and incident reports, but it might advance to just “doing your own thing” without consulting or informing the SSW or other professionals. Initially you may feel there’s no consequence, but this is a very slippery slope, which can, worst case scenario, bring a premature end to your fostering career. Do seek to address this yourself, and don’t wait until someone else notices – that could well be too late !
This can also happen when you’ve been caring for a child for many years. You may start off determined to do everything “by the book”, but as the years go by, you can a get a little complacent about those additional tasks you have to do as a foster carer. The same tasks – logs, incident reports, training – can get overlooked, delayed or avoided.
Keep in mind that children’s needs change with age, particularly during adolescence and teenage years. Your parenting needs to adapt to meet those needs. Relationships can be strained if your parenting does not meet the evolving needs. Take stock now – there are consequences which can impact on you and the child/YP in your care. Commit yourself to personal improvement and change in 2025.
Do speak with your SSW if you recognise these in yourself.