It’s a specially hard time for fostered teens
The coronavirus outbreak has forced young people across the UK to change their plans for the future.
Three students told the Mirror how their post-university plans have been derailed completely and what they are doing instead.
Ekta Khanchandari, 23, is an international student studying for an MA in interactive journalism at City University. Since lockdown, she has been frantically searching for a job.
She said: “I’m trying to apply to a couple of jobs every day, but I haven’t heard back from anyone. And knowing your visa is going to run out in three months isn’t very fun.”
“If I have to move back home to Mumbai, it would be a step back.”
In the meantime, Ekta has divided her free time between cooking, doing a food blog and learning coding through an online Harvard course.
Paul McCarthy, 22, is a final-year economics student at Lancaster University.
He said: “They have completely scrapped all exams, so we’re getting final grades based on course work… which means an essay that was worth 20% of a module is now worth 100%.”
Most university sports competitions have been cancelled or postponed.
But Paul added: “We had an online version of Varsity against the University of York. For the darts competition, we set up a live stream and people put cameras next to their dartboards at home.”
Niyazi Erisken, 21, had flown to Colombia with his girlfriend at the end of February and had planned to spend five months travelling across
South America.
He said: “We arrived in Bogota and for a couple of weeks we just went about our travels as normal.
“Then Colombia announced they were going into lockdown, so we booked the first flight home we could.
“The first month back, I did some online courses to keep me busy, but I’ve lost the structure to my life. I’m not working at the moment but I’m due to start a job in the summer, so I’m not too stressed about finding work.”
Lockdown in Britain is presenting many new problems for society. But teens in foster care are particularly losing out.
School closures have left foster teens at home without vital contact with their friends and education professionals.
After-school clubs and sports teams have all been cancelled. A source of happiness, acceptance and togetherness for these teens has been lost and replaced by being confined to the home of their foster parents.
Social relationship building is incredibly important for foster teens.
Around once a month, these children will spend a weekend away, visiting other foster parents. It allows them to make trusting relationships with other adults while giving their primary carers a weekend off.
Support care has been cancelled, along with visits from social workers, who work with foster children, helping them develop psychologically and ensuring they are safe.
These sessions have now been moved to phone or video calls which are less helpful for struggling foster children.
Nicola Crane, 44, from Derbyshire, is a therapeutic foster carer specialising in the most psychologically challenging cases.
She says foster children often have the emotional development of a child five years younger and going to school, clubs and support care helps build social skills and trusting relationships.
Ms Crane also says drastic changes to routine can be very difficult for these teens and can lead to physical abuse, increased anxiety and regressing to behaviours from a traumatic past.
Louise, a foster parent of a 16-year-old, said that being cooped up in her home and with a lack of activities has led to her foster daughter becoming anxious and aggressive. “She becomes furious whenever I express a need for some alone time,” says Louise, 35, from the East Midlands.
Ms Crane says teens link their carer’s individual needs to abandonment which they have likely experienced to end up in foster care. This can lead to some expressing themselves through anger.
Despite the difficulties of lockdown, there are positives from isolating with foster teens.
“He’s in heaven in his room playing Xbox, watching movies and chatting with friends,” says Jo, 36, from the East Midlands.
Jo also described how the lockdown has helped her family connect and her foster children are less anxious with the suspension of school, due to simple things such as being able to eat together as a family.
Leanne, 42, from Leicestershire, said not having visits from a social worker made her 14-year-old foster son feel free of the stigma of being a “child in care”.
But despite the positive sides to caring in isolation, Ms Crane warns: “Lockdown will have a definite detrimental effect on their [foster children’s] long-term progress when it comes to surviving as a social adult in a social world.”