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“I am who I am because I foster” – Sadia’s story
Before Sadia started fostering, she was a single parent struggling to care for two young children alongside working full-time in IT. She was constantly juggling the demands of work and home, worrying about being late for work in the morning or late collecting her children from school in the afternoon.
She recalls seeing an older couple with three children who used to visit the IKEA store where she worked most weekends. Sadia said:
“I got talking to them and they said they were foster carers. They really inspired me. The children seemed so happy. I’m from Pakistan and I’d always wanted a big family so the idea of fostering appealed to me. The couple offered to give me the details of their fostering agency – The National Fostering Agency – and I said yes. Within six months I began the application process.”
Language and cultural challenges
Sadia was approved as a foster carer in July 2016. Her first foster child was an unaccompanied young person who was an asylum seeker. She said:
“I wasn’t too sure at first. I thought it might be problematic, but my supervising social worker persuaded me to give it a go and said they’d support me completely. It worked out really well. The young man was 13 and from Afghanistan. There was a language barrier and also some cultural challenges. My son was nine and my daughter, five at the time and I don’t think the young man was very keen to be in a house just with a woman and two young children. But on the first night, my son and he sat together and by the morning he’d changed his mind and decided he wanted to stay.
“He was with us until he turned 18 and then we gradually helped him to transition to living independently. He’s a lovely, caring young man who was great with my kids and used to help around the house. He made my life very easy and because of him I took on another unaccompanied asylum-seeking young man, also from Afghanistan. He was 15 when he came and took his cue from the older boy. He stayed with us until he was 21. Both of them were great.”
Respite fostering
After the young men left, Sadia wanted to take a short break from fostering unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people and decided to become a respite foster carer for younger children. She took care of a 10-month-old baby and an 18-month-old came as an emergency placement. Sadia worried that her son, who was studying for A levels at the time, might find having babies in the house a distraction.
“It wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “My kids loved it. They played with them all the time and really helped me which was great because little ones can be tiring. In time, we had another unaccompanied asylum-seeking young person who came to live with us, but this didn’t work out as well as the previous ones. He was with us for seven months but in the end, he left and went to live in a residential home.”
The two younger children are still living with her and, three years on, she is applying to become their long-term foster carer.
Flexibility
For Sadia, fostering is both rewarding and challenging. It has given her the flexibility to look after her birth children alongside doing something meaningful in her life. She also believes it’s had a positive influence on her birth children.
“My son in particular was influenced in a positive way by the boys who stayed with us. They acted like big brothers to him and having them living with us taught both my children to appreciate what they have because some young people don’t have the same advantages. For myself, it has taught me greater patience and compassion. I’ve always loved children but for a child who has been removed from their family, it’s important to have an even greater amount of love. I say to people ‘You become the work you do’. I am who I am because I foster.”
