By KentOnline.co.uk — 2021
My wife and I are both full time Foster Carers with Kent Fostering and started our fostering journey when our children were babies.
Read on www.kentonline.co.uk
CLEAR ALL
The author feels strongly that foster parents who are able to recognize their limits before they reach them are better equipped to keep going.
Parenting foster children who have come to your home from trauma, neglect or abuse is likely the hardest work you will ever do. It requires you to have a wide variety of tools in your parenting toolbox. Self-care for foster parents is one of the most important tools you can have in that toolbox.
New research demonstrates parental burnout has serious consequences. As defined by the study, burnout is an exhaustion syndrome, characterized by feeling overwhelmed, physical and emotional exhaustion, emotional distancing from one’s children, and a sense of being an ineffective parent.
Between taking children to school and managing other to-dos, some days it may feel like you don’t get a minute to yourself. And even when you hear about, self-care, you may dismiss it as frivolous, unnecessary, or even selfish.
When your child is sick in the hospital, it can feel like you’ve entered an alternative universe. That heartache hit me like a tidal wave while caring for my desperately ill son in two children’s hospitals for eight months straight in 2015.