What do you do when the girl you're fostering displays extreme behaviour?
A foster carer from the West Country tells how sometimes you just have to let go
- I have been a foster carer for more than 20 years, mostly looking after girls in their teens. I've become attached to many of the girls, but Stephanie was a bit special. She was bright, funny and had few visible scars of her past.
Stephanie settled in well at the local high school and had soon made friends. She got the odd bit of teasing, but nothing that seemed to overly affect her and she seemed to brush it off.
I couldn't believe how smoothly everything was going, which I later realised could and should have been a wake-up call.
A few weeks later I took a call from a teacher at Stephanie's school.
She hadn't been attending all her lessons and the teacher was worried she was being hassled by some of the older kids. Stephanie admitted there had been problems, but said that now it was out in the open, she would go every day.
Social services were happy that things were under control. But they were about to get worse. Stephanie had been hanging around a shop when she hadn't been to school. She had developed a crush on a boy who worked there.
That's only natural for a teenager, but she was becoming more obsessive.
I knew the man who owned the shop, so I had a word with him and asked him to call me if she started hanging around there again.
One day I got a call. Stephanie had been down there again, but when the owner had told her he was going to call me, she reacted in a way that I didn't think possible.
She threatened to cut herself with a knife in front of him, started screaming and said she was going to hurt herself.
Thankfully, the owner didn't call the police and talked to her until I arrived. I managed to calm her down but, at this point, realised she was far more troubled than I had imagined.
I thought carefully about what to do next, and decided to contact social services and asked them to place her somewhere with more specialist care.
As a foster carer for a local authority I hadn't received the training to allow me to cope with behaviour like this.
I wept after Stephanie had gone, but I had taken the right action to make sure she got the best possible care.
- Have you ever faced a tough professional choice? Call Stovin Hayter on 020 8267 4767 or email stovin.hayter@haynet.com.
