"There’s a family feel to fostering with Barnardo’s”: Gillian and Megan share their experiences of fostering

Gillian has three birth children, one adopted son and one foster daughter who will soon be adopted.  Megan has three birth children. She has also fostered three little girls and provided day care for two sisters over the past three years. When she started fostering she had some concerns about how her birth children, aged 7, 11 and 13, would find the experience. 

Megan and Gillian have a large extended family, who act as a great support network for them. The family are very welcoming and open to the children that are in and out of their lives. “They also experience the heartbreak that comes when they leave,” says Gillian. 

How long a foster placement lasts depends on the type of care the child might need. We offer different types of foster care ranging from a night or a week, to a month, or sometimes years. The pair say that when a placement comes to an end they experience happiness knowing a child is moving on to a more permanent home. But there is also sadness when it comes to them leaving.  

Sometimes there is a real connection with a child and it can feel like a bereavement when it’s time for them to move on. Megan shares that she sobbed bringing one particular child back to her birth parents. She says “I cried for weeks, we all did. There was a lot of sadness around letting her go, but also a lot of happiness because she was able to return to her birth parents and grandparents. Truthfully, it was probably worse than any death we’ve experienced. But we’d do it again, and we are doing it again.”  

Megan and Gillian are encouraging anyone who has considered fostering to get in touch with Barnardo’s.

The pair feel the training the received helped prepare them to support the children they’d be caring for. They completed initial training and then a further course on how trauma can affect a child. 

As well as our foster carer training, they also said the availability of our 24-hour helpline made them feel that there was always support on offer, whenever it was needed.   

Through the training they got to know other foster carers and were able to share experiences. Gillian says “The peer support that you get within the training is nearly as valuable as the training itself. It’s so valuable speaking to other foster carers and realising that they might be facing the same issues as you.” 

Megan and Gillian are urging anyone considering fostering to get in touch with us to find out more about becoming a foster carer.