Every child deserves adults who responsibly look after its welfare. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and many children experience a very negative start in life and can continue to do so throughout their developing years. This could be due to cases of child abuse, neglect, addiction or incarceration. These are issues that negatively affect a child’s life from an earlyage, even when they are still in the womb.

In an endeavour to preserve the family, the Child Protection Services would first try to improve the children’s environment. However, if this is unsuccessful, the children would have to be enrolled into the care system. In this system, children can find foster carers who are willing to love them as if they were their own. During their time with the child, these foster carers do their utmost to provide security and stability until the children can return to their biological family.

It is already hard to be a parent, but being a foster carer is even harder. It requires getting to know and understand the brain of a traumatised child. This includes a thorough understanding of the causes of developmental trauma and how to be a therapeutic parent. This knowledge will help foster carers build a trusting and safe relationship with the children in their care.

A positive relationship is the key to healing traumatised children., Therefore it is a must for foster carers to learn how to build such a relationship with them. Standard parenting styles will not make this difference but understanding therapeutic parenting principles and applying them in practice will. Although therapeutic parenting skills and strategies are beneficial for any child, they are particularly effective with traumatised children.

Learning how to respond rather than react, is perhaps the essence of what it means to be a therapeutic parent. Pausing and trying to understand why your foster son steals food from the fridge at night and hoards it under his mattress, only to find it full of mould a month later, rather than losing it and screaming your head off, will prove more effective in addressing this behaviour, both in the short and long term. If you take a time-out, when your foster daughter is acting out, you would still address the behaviour but without reinforcing her possible history of abandonment.

In addition, foster carers try to give the child stability and security through a daily/weekly routine, so that the child has no insecurities and finds comfort. This would lead to fewer meltdowns and better regulation of the child.

The above examples are just a few of the many therapeutic parenting techniques that foster carers choose to learn and practise with the children in their care. Every day they choose to be there for their children to provide them with the much-needed nurturing experiences that pave the way for their healing.

If you would like to get fully involved in the lives of vulnerable children/teenagers, and require further information, please do not hesitate to contact the Fostering Team on Freephone 1778 or via the Facebook page – Fostering Service Malta.

“Fostering is the most exhausting thing that I ever did but also the most worthwhile” – Sarah Naish (Ex-Foster Parent and Adoptive Parent and founder of the National Association of Therapeutic Parenting, UK).

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