Compassion begins at home
We’re always being urged to help children in foreign crisis zones. But, says MARTIN NEWLAND, there are thousands of British youngsters in need. So he and his wife have bravely and selflessly decided to become foster parents – just as their four fly the ne
Christmas morning 2015; our four children pile onto our bed (it’s a big bed) and gleefully open their stockings. this has been a family tradition since our offspring were tiny. however, Evelyn, 26, raphael, 23, Otto, 20, and Gabriel, 14, have long since stopped believing in Father Christmas, and after a week of celebration and laughter, three of them depart for work and university.
my wife, Benedicte, and i are left with a fridge full of leftovers and balled-up wrapping paper blowing through our draughty old house like brightly coloured tumbleweed.
it’s a moment of realisation; our nest is almost empty.
By the end of this month, however, we expect — hope — that our home will once again be filled with the sounds of a young child, or even children.
Next week, we will appear before a suffolk fostering panel — the final stage in a six-month odyssey of training programmes, background checks, interviews and health and safety vetting to prepare us for the arrival into our home of our first child in care.
as we have discovered, fostering is not for the fainthearted. the training, interviews, and visits to placements have revealed the full extent of what we might be up against: children removed from their homes because they are at risk of, or have experienced, neglect, violence or sexual abuse.
Children surrendered into care by parents who cannot cope any longer for a variety of reasons ranging from ill health to extreme poverty.
Children who have never known love, who live in fear, confusion and anger. Undersized and malnourished children.
Children whose intermittent schooling has left them educationally challenged, their troubled lives book-ended by neglect at home and teasing at school.
the examples of abuse and neglect — even in our leafy county — have sometimes made my wife and i stare at one another in shock and disbelief.
We met two little girls during a visit to foster carers as part of finding out about the challenges we might face. the girls were undersized for their age but lively and happy, if a little wary of being left alone.
they had apparently been sent to school smeared in excrement, wearing just coats, with lunches containing, bizarrely, cooking oil.
the youngest, a five year old, could barely speak when she arrived at her foster placement. her seven-year-old sister had bald patches due to neglect. But here they were, playing with Plasticine and asking, politely, for another slice of banana cake.
ThE girls’ carers were saints — calm and attentive. a living bridge from a life of neglect and hopelessness to one of dignity and love.
We were told of another child who, when presented with a bicycle by her foster carers, disappeared up to her room, undressed and lay on her bed, ready to repay the favour in keeping with prior domestic protocols.
social services are diligent in laying out the reality of looking after a child who, say, may have been forced to live on dog food, or whose only experience of physical contact in the family home was at the end of a fist.
But while we have become more apprehensive as we have progressed through training and vetting, we are no less determined.
so why have Benedicte and i, both aged 55, decided to open our comfortable, middle-class lives to disruption?
a key reason is that it is hard to walk away from an initial inquiry into being a foster carer.
this is the under-appreciated frontline of child suffering. We in the middle classes tend to outsource our duty of care via a standing order for a child in africa, or for a mistreated spanish donkey. We cluck disapprovingly at the suffering of syrian children over a nice bottle of merlot at dinner parties.
We allow preachy celebrities who criticise UK policy on admitting migrants to act as buffers between ourselves and personal action.
During a stage run at the Barbican in 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch treated theatregoers, who had paid to see him playing hamlet, to criticism of the Government’s policy towards syrian refugees arriving in Europe.
Later, he explained that it was the picture of the drowned syrian toddler alan Kurdi, washed up on a turkish beach, which had prompted him, ‘as a new parent’, to speak out.
But the real coal face of human need — of children facing unimaginable suffering — exists within a few miles of where you are reading this.
there are about 70,000 children in care in the UK, and the number grows every year. about three-quarters of these are with foster carers and nearly 9,000 are children in need of placement.
many are suffering, even dying, in our own communities at the hands of abusers who are not the subjects of a sustained, globally politicised and televised humanitarian crisis.
the shortage of foster carers means that some children are still with their parents, though under strict supervision by social services. it also means that children may be split from their siblings, or placed far from home, compounding their sense of insecurity and social dislocation.
ON a personal level, Benedicte and i miss terribly the unique joys and challenges that come with the care of small children.
We have spent only four of the past 20 years in the UK, engaged as i was — as a former national newspaper editor — in newspaper launches and consultancy in Canada and the middle East.
throughout these expatriate years, we imagined ourselves ending up in a big family home — an aga-equipped, vine-clad, big-lawned house with a garden pond in the countryside.
We finally have it, but the children have gone. Only Gabriel remains, and he is 6ft 2in and displays that characteristic teenage aloofness, bordering on contempt, that most parents will recognise.
meanwhile, my wife can be found daily hovering over her laptop in our cavernous kitchen like an air traffic controller, overseeing holding patterns and approaches for any grown-up children in need of a train ticket home, or a withdrawal from the Bank of mum and Dad.
she even has the email account of our 23-year-old son piped into her smartphone as he sometimes drops off the grid for weeks at a time.
i literally stalk Gabriel, manning the rugby touchline and shouting unwanted advice at every school and club game — unfortunately sometimes referring to him as ‘angel’.
Like so many parents of our age,
we are in limbo — the children gone and grandchildren not yet here — manning this great ship of a house. We’re surrounded by empty rooms and walk a dog we never wanted but which the absent children appear to love more than us, so won’t let us rehome.
The muscle memory of looking after small children remains in middle age.
We are not ready to forgo the feeling of tiny hands pressed into ours on walks, of small, hot bodies curled on our laps.
We miss the Christmas Eve briefings on the exact location of Santa, the conversations about whether Jesus or Superman would prevail in a fight, the high temperatures and A&E visits, the soothings after nightmares, the randomly executed artwork brought home from school. We miss seeing young personalities develop as a result of our input.
It is said that people can be split into two categories — ‘radiators’ and ‘drains’; those who radiate warmth, or who drain the energy of others.
My wife, who gave up her career as a City lawyer upon becoming pregnant with Evelyn, is a radiator, not just with her own children and family, but with anyone in need. People seeking help just seem to gather around her. She adores children and had been thinking of fostering for some time.
Then, one night last year after watching the news and seeing the plight of Syrian child refugees, I lumbered into the kitchen suggesting that we should do something to help. The conversation turned to children closer to home — and our plans began to crystallise.
We spoke to Gabriel first, as he will be at home for a while yet. Though he was not keen on adoption he soon came to see the value in fostering younger children. It will be his reaction to the disruption caused by fostering that determines whether we carry on or not.
Out of consideration to him we have asked that the child who comes to live with us is aged between four and ten, rather than of a similar age.
We have also said we do not want a child who self-harms, or who displays sexualised behaviour.
For now, we are refusing any child with ‘limited life expectancy’, on the basis that it would be traumatic for our youngest.
We see the need to care for these deeply wounded children, but Gabriel comes first.
The rest of our children, meanwhile, are wholly supportive and wrote heartwarming testimonials for social services about our qualities as parents.
What we face now will, of course, be different to bringing up our own children. The foster carer occupies a difficult space in the life of a child in care. You are not their parents in the legal sense. You are told, for instance, that a child in your care should not be encouraged to call you ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’.
The law requires that parental authority be preserved, although the courts and social services retain ultimate decision-making powers over the child.
So the foster parent does not have an automatic final say, even sometimes over seemingly basic decisions such as getting haircuts and having sleepovers.
Your main job is advocating for the child — at school and sometimes with social workers. In this way, the spontaneity of parenthood is not there. You can normally get what you want, but you have to ask for it first.
You might have a placement who the day before was removed from his or her school, who expected to go home rather than to a strange couple in an unfamiliar place.
You might have a child for one night, or for two weeks as part of a respite care arrangement with other foster parents. You might have a child for years, with or without a view to possible adoption. A child in your care might never have sat at a dinner table, or slept in a bed before. Many cannot identify a piece of fruit. Some steal food, even though they have open access to the foster family larder.
Records and diaries have to be maintained as a permanent developmental (or legal) record for social services and as a protection for carers, some of whom end up on the wrong end of a bogus sexual assault claim by a damaged and angry child.
We can expect a child, or children, with few boundaries and limited self-awareness, who is in an almost permanent state of anxiety.
Research shows that the brains of newborns who do not experience a traditional parental response born of love do not develop as fast as the brains of those who do.
Key stages of development governing the creation of rational thought and the interpretation of emotions are lost, producing children physiologically hardwired to find normal society a challenge.
We live in an age of catharsis, where ‘closure’ and ‘healing’ in adversity are achievable and expected. I wonder if this is always a realistic expectation for a foster parent. With many children, all you can do is hold their hand and let them know they are not alone.
I suspect the best gift we can give is that unique and powerful brand of unconditional love that we gave to our own children before waving them off to new lives.
WE DO not expect this to be a strain on our marriage. Benedicte and I met 35 years ago as we exited our teens, and we are approaching our 30th wedding anniversary. We have been through enough together — family deaths and illness, the dislocation of expat life, unemployment and child rearing — to get through this.
And there are heartening success stories, though measuring such a thing in the context of a shattered young life can be more nuanced.
We learned about an older woman who took in a young lad who has benefited from an academic scholarship and is now contemplating Oxbridge.
There’s the older couple whose horizons for years had been confined to the rhythms of daily village life. Then they fostered a boy, and now find themselves travelling to dance competitions and making his costumes. The lives of older foster parents can change positively, too.
Benedict Cumberbatch says that ‘as a new parent’ he had to speak out about the Government’s refugee policy. ‘As a parent’ it’s the dehumanising way in which some children are forced to subsist in this, a ‘civilised’ country, that I find impossible to ignore.
So if you have not, like us, finished with the business of caring for children, if you are waiting for the grandchildren to arrive and you have the space at home, if you have an inclination to help with the care of a desperate child, I urge you to look up your local authority fostering service.
You will soon know if fostering is for you.