'I'm a Black mum who's fostered 19 babies in 10 years - and I'm exhausted'
A foster carer who has taken in 19 babies over 10 years says more needs to be done to encourage people of ethnic minority backgrounds to follow in her footsteps.
Sarah Livingstone, 55, from Camden, northwest London, began taking in children once her own son and daughter had grown up because she felt she had "more Mummy left in me". Her aunt had been a foster carer and she'd seen the positive impact the process could have over several years with many kids.
But long before that, her life was surrounded by them anyway - her home was always open to children in the neighbourhood and school friends of her own kids. Caring for others is where she felt she shone the most. "It’s just in me, it’s in my blood. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do," she told the Mirror, as part of our Black History Month series.
She was a young single mum, having had her son at 16, and didn't want her kids, let alone others they knew, ending up out on the streets or getting into crime. She'd often become a sympathetic ear to kids who just needed time away from their family. Sarah is of mixed race - with her mum white and dad Black - and grew up in a predominantly white household.
"Nobody in my family looked like me and when I reached my teens I struggled a lot with identity and who I was," she said. "And I thought even if I had the right to call myself Black, do mixed race people call themselves Black? I didn’t know. I went through my struggles with my hair and my skin and how to walk in two worlds. That’s how it feels sometimes."
Greggs, Costa & Pret coffees have 'huge differences in caffeine', says report
Figures compiled by Ofsted in 2020, based on data from 146 of the 153 local authorities that provide fostering services in England, found 68% had a shortage or undersupply of foster carers from a BAME background. Nowhere is this highlighted more than where Sarah lives, with Camden Association for Foster Carers finding that 80 percent of children in care in the local authority are from Black and ethnic minorities.
Chair of CAFC, Sarah said a child being fostered by someone of a different ethnic or cultural background can cause major issues with identity because it can leave them - like she was - feeling stuck between two worlds. "Identity is important for all children but it is particularly crucial for ethnic minority children in foster care who may be separated from their birth family, cultural heritage, community, and sense of self," she explained.
"A lot of people take identity for granted. When you think of what you’ve taken from your parents - the music you like to listen to, the foods you like to eat - when certain smells take you back to the kitchen and your mum was making Yorkshire pudding or whatever. Foster children lose all of that. They come into care and all they have is their memories. They literally lose everything that they are and they are expected to adopt the family they’re in, their culture and ways and understanding how to navigate the world. What we need to do better is bridge that gap."
In an effort to help 'bridge the gap', Sarah and James Kargbo, a former fostering team manager for Camden, created Replenish Culture CIC in January, which works with agencies and local authorities to provide boxes filled with hair and skin products for Black children in care. It means foster carers who are not Black, for example, can easily meet cosmetic needs of a child who is.
Sarah said understanding a foster child's background is of the most importance (Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)She said: "What you will find in the Black community, presentation is a lot and also you can tell whether somebody is doing well by the way that they look. If you have a child that is looking ashy and looks like they’re a bit unkempt and hair looks a mess you then have to question whether any of the other stuff in that child’s life needs are being met.
"After that you can start looking at the deeper reasons of who that child is. We do something called a 'me board'. What makes that child who they are? We talk about food, music, colour and we look at the flag of the country the child has ties to." She currently fosters an eight-year-old boy of Somalian and Muslim background.
She said: "My little one has ties to the West Indies, so I will look at what his cultural background is in the West Indies and get him talking about what he thinks that brings to him and what does he believe." Referring to when he first arrived at her home, said: "I was like, okay, I need to do a bit more work around this. I was lucky, I live in London so my neighbour’s up the road are Somalian and Muslim so I just knocked on the door and said I need help. I am very open and say it how it is."
Sarah started Replenish Culture in January which provides skin and hair products for Black children in care (Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)But while providing foster carers with better resources and knowledge to tackle the needs of a child from a different background is hugely beneficial, Sarah accepts it is not always an easy fit. Foster carers don't all live in such a multicultural hub like London and don't necessarily have the inherent understanding of mixed backgrounds as she does due to her upbringing. In an ideal world social workers would have a bigger pool of carers of different ethnicities to pick from so that better match ups can be found.
Sarah said the situation has really come to a head since Covid, when carers were overworked due to a surge in referrals. Eventually, she says it saw people of all backgrounds leaving the profession. "What used to happen, before there was a lack of foster carers, was there would be a lot of internal matching going on," she explained.
"So they were really trying to match the foster carers to the child. They would really try to put a Black carer with a Black child, but it doesn’t happen anymore because they don’t have the resources to do that. It's about trying to get a better understanding, because I think in the Black community there is definitely a fear when it comes to dealing with authority, local authority, social services but there’s also an economic reason why Black people won’t adopt."
'I tricked my sister into giving her baby a stupid name - she had it coming'
Sarah said: "Historically, Black people come from a lower paid sector in the community which means their properties will be smaller. Which means they might not have a spare room to foster or adopt." She said this was magnified during Covid and the cost of living crisis leaving people "holding on by their fingernails" financially.
Sarah says more can be done to bridge the gap in fostering (Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)But she's sure there are people out there who are in a position to step up who haven't - and she believes regardless of its problems, it's one of the most rewarding things someone can do. She just hopes speaking out like this can encourage that next step for someone on the fence.
She still remembers the first child she fostered "like it was yesterday". She went on holiday after passing her assessment, and the day after her return she had a call that a six-month-old baby needed a home. A transition period of a week followed, as the child was coming from another foster carer.
"I just remember walking into this foster carer's house and she had this baby on her hip and he just leant to the side and gave me this huge smile," she explained. "I just went, 'oh my God, I’m in love' straight away. I had him for eight months and then he went to his aunty and uncle."
What followed after that first meeting with the first baby was a "bit of a shock" because it had been 21 years since she'd had a child so young. "I had to quickly do a lot of YouTube searches to find out if you do the same things," Sarah admitted. "Baby on the front, baby on the back. My own children, I breast fed so I had no idea how to sterilise a bottle. I had to do a whole online tutorial on how to sterilise a bottle."
But she "just flew from then on" and had "baby after baby after baby". She didn't have a spare room in her home back then, meaning she could only look after children aged up to three years, as prior to that they can sleep in the foster carer's room. However, since then her daughter has moved out and so she can foster a school-age child now.
Sarah said getting a new child is "like a Christmas present". She explained: "You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl, you don’t know what sort of nationality it’s going to be. You don’t know if it’s going to be asleep or not, cheeky or not cheeky. The energy in the house changes as well."
But she admits the older she gets the harder looking after babies gets, which is why attracting younger people of all backgrounds is crucial. "I don’t do babies anymore, I’ve done 10 years of babies and I love them but I’m tired," she explained. "I’m an older lady now, I’m in my mid-50s and babies take a lot out of you. They are lovely, I can’t imagine not doing that, I’m glad I had the chance to do that. But I do feel the difference in 10 years when I first started having babies to when I had my last baby last year. Late night feeds, 10 years of no sleep," she added, laughing.
But it's more than just bringing in new blood, Sarah has seen such a drop off in funding and resources over the years, and carers are crying out for more support. It takes a special type of person to take up the profession but even then, without solid reinforcement it can break anyone.
There's no training manual for the emotional turmoil felt when giving up a baby after several months, for example. Children so young develop a strong attachment to a foster 'aunty' like Sarah, and vice versa. After a child leaves her care, whether to go into adoption, return to their parent or be taken in by another family member, Sarah said: "I grieve."
"You get a phone call and they say we’ve identified a family for the baby. Literally, your stomach hits the floor and you say 'okay'. You have to do transitions where you welcome the new family into your home." This can last around 10 days and allows the child to get used to the new people.
"That time for me is very difficult," she admitted. "I’m always very tired because you’re holding in your own emotions because one thing you have to remember this family member or this adopted family, for them it is one of the happiest times of their lives." She said she never wants her feelings of grief to "over power that".
"You do your crying when nobody is there. You don’t want to do it in front of the child because you don’t want the child to think there is anything wrong. But your heart is hurting, you are physically hurting. I always find when a child leaves, I’m physically shattered. That is when I can take that time to grieve and cry and spend time with my family and talk about the child. It’s our time of healing, we talk about what that child brought to our home and repair ourselves for the next child."
But there comes another modern issue. That time between fostering different children is crucial for a carer to rebuild emotionally and prepare for the next. Since Covid, Sarah said "the time you have between children is not as long as it used to be" - hence another possible reason for the drop off. She said: "The turnover is pretty quick. When I get a phone call and it’s another child that might need me, it’s really hard for me to say 'no I need to take some more time out'. You always think there’s a social worker trying to put a child into a home so they know the child is going to be safe."
The youngest child she has been given was just four hours old. She got a phone call a month before and then as soon as the birth mum had gone through labour the baby was handed over. "For some reasons, mum can’t always be with their child," she said. In such situations, it might be because the mum has substance abuse or mental health problems or there is a history of neglect.
Asked why she thinks Covid saw such a surge in children being referred, she said: "Unwanted pregnancy, domestic abuse, there was a lot more things that were hidden, kids were not going to school, there weren’t eyes on children. And then everything opened up and all of sudden these kids are going to school with horror stories.
"A lot more substance abuse in lockdown, so many factors, economics because people lost their jobs. People might not have had the government helping them out. A lot more pressures in lockdown where you’re putting families together that are holding on by their finger nails but the children go to school in the day and parents go to work but you’re putting them all together and expecting them to get on all day."
Sarah said overall "we need to do better for our looked after children and in turn our foster carers". She added: "Children now are coming in with a lot more complex issues than they had 10 years ago." And it's a vicious cycle: extra funding, while allowing CICs like Replenish Culture and other carer resources to flourish further. It would also mean better preventative measures to take the strain off to start with. "If the money and the facilities are not there then that means more children will come into care," she added.
To find out more about Replenish Culture click here.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
