Parent and Child Fostering

What is parent and child fostering?

Parent and child fostering (previously known as mother and baby placements) is where you offer a home to both. This doesn’t necessarily mean just mother and baby; sometimes both parents will require a placement along with their child(ren). The parent(s) may be under 18 and will be a looked after child themselves, although not in every case. Sometimes the parent will be placed during the pregnancy so you can help them prepare.

There are several reasons why a parent may require a placement. They may need additional support, help and advice, and your role will be to teach and support so they can move to independence. Or there may be significant concerns about parenting capacity and assessments are being made about their capacity to provide care to their child. Sometimes you would need to provide full care to the child and mentor the parent, whereas in other cases you will need to take a step back and review how well the parent is coping.

In all cases, the main aim of this type of placement is to help ensure that the child and parent(s) can remain together.

We passionately believe that all children need a loving and safe home and, where possible, if a child can remain with their parents, we believe this is a positive outcome. As a charity, we reinvest any surplus income in order to provide more training and support for our parent and child fostering households.

What does parent and child fostering involve?

Providing a fostering placement for a child and their parent(s) within your home is very different to caring for a child alone. The main difference is that you will have another adult living in your home and this means that you will be negotiating your relationship with them in a different way, than if you were only fostering children and young people.

You will provide support with skills for independence such as cooking, cleaning, budgeting and life skills. The role of the foster parent is also to provide an opportunity for enhancing the self-esteem and social skills of the parent, to support them in coping with trauma they’ve experienced and to ensure a positive experience for the parent and child.

As a foster carer, you will be contributing to the assessments and maintaining clear and concise recordings to provide to the social worker and Court.

A typical placement lasts for 12 weeks, although sometimes it can be extended if the Court agrees that the parent should receive more support, or if more time is needed to complete any assessments.

Is there a parent and child fostering allowance?

All foster carers, no matter what kind of fostering they choose to do, will be paid a generous fostering allowance.

When you have undertaken the additional training required in order to provide parent and child foster care, you will receive an enhanced parent and child fostering allowance of up to £800 per week when a child and their parent is placed with you. This is to reflect the highly skilled ‘parent and child fostering’ role you would be taking on.

There are also some additional payments available, along with generous tax reliefs and other expenses that you can claim for.

Specialist training for parent and child fostering

All foster carers receive the same general training, but as parent and child fostering is different from other types of fostering, there is additional specialist training you would need to undertake.

This training would include a specific focus on working with parents, child development and adults with additional needs; this could be learning needs, substance misuse or domestic violence. Furthermore, your records are crucial to enabling decisions to be made when the placement ends – so you will be given guidance on how and what to record.

At TACT, we offer a dedicated Child and Parent training course, along with other training such as Safeguarding, Paediatric First Aid, Understanding Post-Natal Depression and Psychosis and Record Keeping for Court.

Parent and child fostering support

All foster carers at TACT receive our comprehensive support, which includes being allocated your own dedicated Supervising Social Worker and full 24/7 support.

As a parent and child carer, we provide additional support in the form of a ‘buddy system’ of another foster carer who is experienced in parent and child fostering. Support groups meet monthly which you can attend, and you will also have a foster carer rep to support you.

This ensures that you have plenty of resources around you, should you have a question or need some help or advice.

Could you foster a parent and their child?

Being instrumental in keeping a family together is one of the most rewarding types of foster care.

If you feel that you could change a family’s life, you can make an enquiry today. Our team of enquiry officers will talk you through the process of becoming a foster carer with TACT. We are a charity, so we place no pressure on anyone to apply and make no profit from the care of young people. Fostering needs to be the right choice for you and your household.