Children Needing Fostering

Do siblings have to be placed together?

They don't have to be placed together, but it's very good practice for them to be placed together unless there's a really good reason why they shouldn't be placed together. If children have experienced lots of chaos in their early lives, if they've experienced the trauma and difficulty of actually coming into care, then one of the things that we know makes a huge difference to them is staying in contact with their siblings. So unless there's a very good reason why they can't be placed together, they should be.

Do foster children tend to have a lot of emotional problems?

I would say that many children coming into foster care will have emotional problems, and that's really not surprising if you think about why those children are in foster care. They'll be in the care of the state. They'll have come into foster care because of abuse and neglect, because of dysfunction in their own families. They will be children who, typically, will have had to deal with a great deal in their lives. And for many of those children, that will have translated with them into emotional difficulties.

Are foster childern usually placed in the area that they live?

That's often the goal. It's often really helpful if a child can actually be placed close to a community they know, if they're still able to attend the same school, if they can keep their friends. All of those things may actually really help a child to adjust to life in foster care. Of course, there may be extremely good reasons why it's not safe for a child to remain in a particular area, and so those children may need to be placed further away. It's also a fact that for some children there just won't be foster placements that are available locally, and so for those children they may need to go further for that as well.