Sadly, the majority of children enter foster care because of neglect, abuse, or loss. Even if a child has been removed from the home at a very early age, the trauma that they’ve experienced can have a lasting impact on their mental health and well-being. Supporting them through this trauma at an early age is crucial to helping them work through their feelings and start building a brighter future for themselves.
Working with your foster child’s nursery to support them through their trauma will be key to their emotional recovery. Responses to trauma can present as challenging behaviour and need to be handled with care and compassion.
We’re going to take a closer look at how you can work with your nursery to support a child with trauma so they can learn how to cope with their feelings and thrive in their later years.
Why is it important to support a child with trauma?
The early years of a child’s life are a crucial stage in their development. This includes language skills, dealing with emotions, and how they interact with those around them. All foster children carry trauma and many have experienced some form of abuse and loss in their short lives. Giving them the skills they need to move on from their past experiences is key to encouraging positive outcomes for your foster child.
The experiences that children have during this period of their lives may affect their ability to:
- Build up emotional resilience.
- Form secure attachments.
- Develop positive relationships.
- Cope with change and manage stress.
Younger children need to be taught how to process and understand their emotions; until they do, they may have emotional outbursts both at home and in a nursery setting. Your foster child’s nursery will be experiencing some of this complex behaviour, so it’ll be important to work with them to help your child’s emotional regulation.
Taking a trauma-informed approach through therapeutic fostering will be a crucial aspect of helping them to recover from their trauma.
What does trauma look like in a young child?
Children who have experienced trauma:
- Struggle to regulate strong emotions.
- Feel unsafe and on edge in unfamiliar environments.
- Find it hard to trust adults and form attachments.
- Struggle to concentrate throughout the day.
- Find unexpected changes difficult to deal with.
Can become triggered and re-traumatised by things that remind them of traumatic memories, such as smells, sounds, or certain situations.
Empathy and consistency will be important for helping your foster child work through their trauma. They need to see your home and their nursery environment as a safe space to help them work through their emotions and to build trust with the adults they encounter on a day-to-day basis.
Attachment and trauma in early years
The experiences that children can have even from a young age can affect how they interact with the world around them as they grow older. Trauma experienced in a child’s early years – and the length of time that they’re exposed to toxic stress – can severely impact on their development.
What is trauma?
A traumatic event is something unexpected that can distress a person. This could be a larger event such as a natural disaster, or something smaller and more personal to you. It’s not the size of this traumatic event that can affect you – it’s how you feel about it afterwards.
Traumatic events that happen to a small child may take them a while to understand, especially if it’s coming to terms with the loss of family members.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are potentially traumatic events that a child can experience before they reach the age of 18. The more ACEs that a child has, the more likely this will impact on their emotional, neurological and social development. These can have a negative impact on a child’s behaviour and health for the rest of their lives.
Attachment theory in early years
Attachment is such an important part of a child’s development. This is the bond created between a child and their caregiver, and this relationship will define how a child forms attachments with other people throughout their entire life.
Children form attachment throughout the first two years of their life. An emotional bond and consistently meeting a child’s needs ensures that they are able to form a secure attachment to their caregiver. If a child’s needs aren’t met and they can’t form a safe attachment to their primary caregiver, this can have a negative impact on their developmental milestones.
Supporting foster children in nursery
Your foster child’s nursery will see them regularly, which means they’ll witness any responses to trauma firsthand.
Communication with your nursery is important so the nursery staff are aware of how to best help your foster child while in their care. Taking a trauma-informed approach can help your child work through their feelings.
Here are a couple of things that could help your nursery support a child with trauma:
- Routine – giving your foster child a predictable and reliable environment can help them to feel safe. This could include visual timetables, countdowns before transitions, and a predictable structure to the day.
- Emotional regulation – leaning into big emotions and telling your foster child that it’s okay to feel that way, such as frustrated or upset. Show them that their emotions are valid and can be manageable.
- Sensory tools – giving your foster child fidget toys, soft toys or a quiet space they can go to can help them to better regulate strong emotions when they feel triggered.
- Storybooks – if a child has experienced loss, using books on a similar topic can help to open up a conversation around this.
- Creative outlets – while a child may not have the words to express complex emotions, using creative hobbies such as drawing or playing with toys can aid them to work through these.
Communicating your foster child’s needs with your nursery
Depending on the complexity of your foster child’s trauma, the nursery will need to be made aware of what they can expect in terms of how this trauma presents itself. Before your foster child is welcomed into the nursery, you’ll need to set up a meeting with the care provider so that you can talk about their needs in more detail.
It won’t be your place to disclose your foster child’s past and what has happened to them, but this is something that your supervising social worker can do. You can arrange a meeting with both the nursery and your child’s social worker so that everyone is in the loop about how you can best support your foster child through their trauma. You can also make the nursery aware of any triggers that might affect your foster child, such as sounds or smells.
It will also be worth talking to the Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) at the nursery to see if there are any additional provisions that could be made for your foster child to help them settle into their new environment. Throughout your foster child’s time in education, you will also have to attend Looked After Child (LAC) reviews, which will include their social worker, the SENCO, and yourself. These meetings happen annually and discuss the needs of your foster child, as well as how everyone can help them to positively progress in education.
Using nursery as a tool for your foster child’s development
It’s important to remember that foster children will be using time at nursery slightly differently to how a birth child would. Whereas nurseries would look after birth children so parents can work, for foster children this is more about getting them to socialise with children of similar ages. As we’ve briefly outlined above, this age is crucial for a child’s development, and they’ll need to learn how to interact with their peers.
Taking a trauma-informed approach
A good nursery environment will understand that all behaviour works as a form of communication. Rather than punishing ‘bad’ behaviour, it’s important to take a trauma-informed approach and instead think about why they have acted in this way. What are the underlying causes, and how they can be addressed?
The main thing to ensure is that your foster child has a consistent and predictable environment they can feel safe in. Predictability will help your child to relax and feel less anxious, and this will help to support their emotional regulation.
Providing your foster child with emotional well-being will help them to better self-regulate. Teaching them emotional literacy in this safe nursery environment can help them to express their feelings as they grow, which will in turn give them the foundations they need for conflict resolution and empathy.
Explore training opportunities
We’ve got lots of courses for you to explore and better your training and development, including on topics such as attachment, ACEs, and trauma awareness. This training can help you improve your knowledge of therapeutic foster care and improve your personal development.
By taking advantage of the range of courses and training available to Fostering People foster parents, you can improve your expertise and learn how to understand the needs of children in your care.
Are you thinking about a future in fostering?
Fostering can be a hard but rewarding vocation for those who want to give back to society and offer children the loving home that they deserve. Each and every child deserves the best opportunities in life to succeed, and foster children are able to do just that with the help of hard-working foster parents like yourself.
Are you thinking of fostering or transferring agency? Fill out our online enquiry form or give us a ring on 0800 077 8159 to speak to one of our friendly advisors. Or if you want to read some real fostering stories, take a look at some of the experiences of some of our existing foster parents.
