 If you are supporting or caring for a child who is either currently or previously looked after, man, I hate those terms, but essentially a child who is in foster care or is adopted or under special guardianship order or some other form of care that means that they care slightly outside the norm, how can you make a difference to that child? So we're kind of hyper aware that these kids are more vulnerable than their peers to many different things, often also very resilient, but they can be more vulnerable and they maybe need that little bit of extra care and support. So what can we do as a trusted adult in their life to make a difference? I'm going to share with you five ideas which are little things you can do that can make a big difference, whether you are a carer, a teacher, a nurse, whoever you might be having a contact with this young person. My ideas that I put together for a conference I spoke at recently in Lincolnshire where we had the whole of the virtual schools network together. So everybody from the whole of Lincolnshire came together who had a role in supporting looked after and previously looked after children and we came together for the day to think about how we can best support the needs of those children and it was a great day. So this is a really brief summary of what I said in my closing keynote that day. So number one was that we can be present and I mean that both physically and emotionally. So often children who are looked after or previously looked after they will have experienced some form of trauma and sometimes they want to talk about that or they just need someone to be with them whilst they work through the feelings related to that. And what can often happen with them is particularly if these challenges they faced are kind of distressing is that we tend to kind of move away rather than moving in because what they really need is someone to sit with them to kind of have the capacity to sit through and tolerate that distress with them just to be there, be present and not be scared of that and allow them to work through it. So just being there, not moving away from them, not running away, either physically or emotionally when they begin to talk about difficult things. That means we need to think carefully about how we look after ourselves too because sometimes we're going to hear things that will distress us or just being present while they're distressed can be distressing for us too. So we need to take a check and make sure we're looking after our own well-being but yeah, be present, remain present, be there for them. Just physically stay in the room, stay emotionally connected, be there. Number two is to care out loud and this is something I return to you a lot but this is the idea that you might be a trusted adult in this child's life and you might really care for them but they might not know that. They're probably not going to assume that you care about them unless you let them know. And sometimes they can have these faulty thinking narratives going on that mean that they will jump onto the negatives and dismiss the positives. We can all be guilty of that sometimes, right? And sometimes when our self-esteem is especially low or we've had lots of different knocks in life, then we're particularly attuned to kind of finding the things that back up the narrative that we have in our head that might be saying that we're useless or unlovable or no one would like us or no one would care for us. And so the trusted adults in our life need to spell it out and we shouldn't just say it, we should show it as well. So if we can actually giving physical tokens, reminders that we do care, that this, you know, you are loved, you are important, you're special, I care for you. Letting them know, making it known, say it, show it, do it. Really, really important to keep reinforcing that message. This child needs to know that they are cared, do it out loud. Number three is not to make any assumptions. So sometimes we can think that we've seen something like this child's story before and when they're talking to us, then we can find ourselves jumping to fill in the gaps. We're looking to the end of the sentence before they've got halfway through and actually we need to let them tell us their story in their words, we need to give them permission to be themselves, to be unique in who they are rather than us making assumptions about what's happened to them or about what they're thinking or we're about what their hopes are. The other thing is that we shouldn't make assumptions about what they can and can't achieve and things like that as well because sometimes we can end up lowering our expectations too far, for example, because we can say, you know, this child has faced a lot. It's great that they're kind of managing to turn up to school every day, for example, but we don't expect a great deal from them. No, no, no, don't make assumptions about what they can and can't do. Aim high with them, for them, have realistic, but you know, good, high expectations where you can and yeah, don't make assumptions about what they can't do. Often these kids are really resilient and yeah, allow them to do that, allow them to bounce back, give them the permission to be resilient and to aim high and be there to catch them if they fall, of course, do. Number four is that we can walk with them. So this goes back a little bit to the be present thing about just being there. So we sometimes wanna go in and fix, right? We want to fix this child's problems, but actually there's gonna be lots of things about this child's circumstances that we can't fix. We can't change what's happened in the past. We can't necessarily change the things that they're thinking and feeling and experiencing right now, but what we can do is to remain present and be the person who walks side by side with them as they face this, as they work through the day, you know, the kind of ups and downs of day to day life. We can be there with them, walking with them. We don't have to fix or necessarily change things in order to be able to be helpful and it's important to remember that sometimes. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can say is this must be really hard or just to quietly be there. And number five, in terms of the helpful things that we can do for our children is to hold on to hope. So sometimes we will find that these kids might feel quite hopeless. They might have bounced around between lots and lots of different homes, for example, and they might feel that they're never gonna find a forever home. They're never gonna feel somewhere where they feel they belong. They might feel unlovable and hopeless and that's really, really tough. And when they are not feeling able to hold on to hope for themselves, then we need to hold on to that hope for them. I always imagine like the little picture that Banksy does of the girl with the heart balloon and I imagine that, like you're holding on to that hope. They can't hold on to that balloon right now, so you need to hold on to it for them. If for any reason the situation evolves into such a way that you're finding it really hard to hold on to the hope for them, maybe you are their foster carer and things are really breaking down and you don't know how you're gonna make this work and you feel at the end of your tether, you need to take that balloon and you need to delegate it and pass it on to someone else who can hold on to that hope. Every child needs someone in their corner holding on to their hope and if we're not in a position to do that, then the next kind of thing we can do is find someone who can. So pass the balloon along. So five small things, which are kind of little big things really that you can do that can make a difference to a child who is currently or previously looked after. I hope you like some of those ideas. I'd love to hear how you can imagine using them and do you have any of your own that you would add? What do you think of the small things that you can do day to day that can make a really big difference to children in these circumstances? I'd love to hear your ideas, do leave them in a comment below. I hope the video was helpful. Please subscribe for new videos every Tuesday and Friday and let me know what you would like in future videos by leaving a comment below. Thanks for watching. Bye.