Supporting asylum-seeking children to feel safe and understood

How to support children seeking asylum

Create boundaries and routine

When unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) enter care, it’s unlikely they’ve experienced any sense of normality for a while. They may have spent weeks, months or even years travelling to the UK, where they may have had to work to pay fees to move through countries, spent time without food, and were at high risk of exploitation.

One of the most important things you can do to help your foster child feel safe when they move in with you is to create stability through routine and structure. Even if you’re providing short-term foster care, when a child knows what time they’re going to bed and waking up, where things are in the home, and generally what’s expected of them and when, it can help them feel safer.

Understand their past

Another crucial step towards helping your foster child feel safe and understood is by recognising how their past could impact their thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and relationships.

At ACS, we support you with this by providing ongoing foster care training, which will give you the knowledge and skills to care for children who’ve had a difficult start to life. You’ll learn how to approach a child’s care with their trauma in mind, meet their individual needs, and help them build a brighter future.

Build a trusting relationship

Perhaps the most effective way to help an asylum-seeking child feel safe and understand is by building a trusting relationship with them.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re staying with you for a few days in an emergency or until they turn 18 through long-term foster care; trust is at the heart of helping UASC build a new life. Here are a few things you can do to support your relationship:

• Help them feel heard: By validating their experiences. Whether they share a moment from their past or something happens at school, always give them a chance to have their say and share their point of view.
• Help them feel valued: By listening to their input. It could be what you have for dinner one night or where you go on a day trip, whatever the situation, let them make the choice sometimes.
• Always be consistent: By always doing what you say you will. If you promise to buy them an ice cream, make sure you do and always stick to the same boundaries for every child in the home. This will help them learn that your word is reliable.
• Get to know each other: By spending quality one-to-one time together. From baking and crafts to a kick about in the park, spend time bonding with your child by doing something they enjoy, just the two of you.
• Provide emotional safety: By accepting all their emotions, even the ones that feel more difficult to manage without shame, blame, and dismissal. While also co-regulating until they learn how to regulate themselves on their own.

Nurture their identity

When children have to leave everything familiar behind and move to an unfamiliar country where everything feels different, it can have a huge knock-on effect on their sense of identity.

Helping your foster child stay connected with their culture, faith and religion can go a long way in nurturing this part of themselves and feeling understood. That’s why, at ACS, we do our very best to match children with foster families who share these aspects of identity with their foster children. When this isn’t possible, we provide training, so you know how to care for children from various backgrounds.

You’ll take your foster child to religious meetings, help them build connections with people from similar walks of life, and cook food that’s familiar to them. You’ll also honour religious festivals with them, such as Eid, if you foster a Muslim child.

Advocate for their needs

When you foster a child, you are their voice, advocating for their needs until they are old enough and have the confidence to advocate for themselves.

You’ll liaise with their social worker, schools, and health care professionals to ensure their needs are met. For example, your foster child might need additional mental health support if they’re suffering from PTSD or one-to-one school support if they’re behind in their education.

They’ll also need your guidance to help them navigate the asylum system and to know what to do if they face prejudice and discrimination. Knowing that they can rely on you to advocate for their whole well-being will help the asylum-seeking children you care for feel safer and understood.

Supporting your whole family

When you foster a sanctuary-seeking child, you provide them with the safe haven they so desperately need, and our foster parents tell us that helping them build a brighter future is what makes the role so rewarding. At ACS, we’re here to support your whole family on this journey by providing:

• Faith-based and cultural matching.
• Extensive training.
• 24/7 support.
• Regular supervision meetings.
• A team that speak several different languages.
• Generous fostering allowances.
• Support group meetings.
• Highly qualified local teams.
• Activities and events for every family member to enjoy.