Fostering Children with Disabilities

As you may imagine, there are large sections of society who have little experience of caring for someone with a disability and who may mistakenly believe that they would not be suitable to care for such a young person. We aim to help potential foster families consider if they can in fact care for a disabled child.

Why do disabled children come into care?

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 regular respite with foster carers for a few days each week, or each month, to help support them.

What are the disabilities they may have?

Some children who are described as ‘disabled’ 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.

What is the long term plan for a disabled child?

Many ‘disabled’ 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.

Who can care for disabled children?

Foster Carers of children with disabilities need understanding and commitment 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.

If you want to find out more about disability fostering please contact us