Every child’s experience of care is different. Behind every fostering, adoption or care journey is a unique story shaped by relationships, loss, resilience and identity. During Foster Care Fortnight, we want not only to celebrate foster carers and care professionals, but also to listen to the voices of people with lived experience of care.
Our wonderful Account Manager Charlotte has written this blog to share how her lived experience of foster care and adoption has shaped both her personal journey and her professional understanding of trauma-informed support.
Charlotte's story
Reflecting on my own experiences as someone with care and adoptive history, I recognise how early experiences of separation and limited support have shaped both my understanding of attachment and my awareness of the gaps that have historically existed within care systems.
As a baby, I spent the first six months of my life in foster care before being adopted. I was adopted at a time when there was very limited understanding of trauma, loss, identity and attachment. Adoptive parents often received little or no specialist training or ongoing support to help them understand the complex emotional and developmental needs of adopted children.
Understanding the impact of care experience
As I have grown older, and particularly through both personal reflection and professional learning, I have come to understand that people who are care experienced, including those who have experienced foster care, residential care, kinship care or adoption, are significantly more likely to have experienced trauma, loss, neglect, abuse, instability and disrupted attachment relationships.
Today, trauma-informed practice is far more widely recognised across social work, education and healthcare. Research into Adverse Childhood Experiences has helped deepen understanding of how early adversity can affect emotional regulation, relationships, learning, behaviour and long-term health outcomes.
Many children entering care have experienced multiple adverse childhood experiences, including domestic abuse, parental substance misuse, emotional neglect, physical abuse or chronic instability. Increasingly, there is also greater awareness of the impact of trauma experienced in utero and the effects of early separation from a birth mother, even where other adverse experiences may not be present.
Trauma is rarely a single event
Over time, I have come to understand that trauma is rarely a single event. More often, it is complex, layered and deeply relational. The effects of those early experiences can continue long into adulthood and can shape identity, emotional wellbeing, relationships and a person’s sense of safety in the world.
From my perspective, this has significant implications for how professionals and carers respond to behaviour and emotional need.
Looking beyond behaviour
Traditional parenting approaches do not always work for children who have experienced developmental trauma. Foster carers and adoptive parents need specialist, trauma-informed understanding that helps them look beyond surface-level behaviour and instead recognise the underlying emotional needs and survival responses driving it.
This is why therapeutic and trauma-informed training is so important across fostering, adoption and wider care systems. Developing understanding around attachment, co-regulation, emotional safety, trauma triggers and sensory dysregulation can help carers build relationships grounded in patience, consistency and trust.
The lifelong impact of care experience
Something else I feel strongly about is that the impact of care experience does not simply disappear when childhood ends.
Research increasingly shows that care-experienced adults are statistically more likely to experience challenges relating to mental health, housing stability, employment, relationships and involvement with the criminal justice system. For me, this reinforces the importance of viewing care experience not as a short-term phase, but as a lifelong context that can continue to shape wellbeing and opportunity into adulthood.
Support should not stop too soon
One of the biggest things I have observed, both personally and through wider conversations within the care-experienced community, is that trauma recovery is not linear. Yet support is often reduced or withdrawn once a child is adopted or reaches adulthood.
Many adoptive families, foster carers and care-experienced adults continue to report difficulties accessing consistent, specialist support at the times they need it most. Services can become fragmented, thresholds for support may increase, and long-term therapeutic provision is not always easily available.
Building support around real lives
Personally, I believe there is a strong argument for more flexible and lifelong approaches to support. This could include ongoing access to trauma-informed mental health services, educational support, stable housing, peer networks, transition support into adulthood and continued support for foster and adoptive families when challenges arise over time.
Ultimately, my experiences have led me to understand care not as a short-term intervention, but as something that can have a lifelong impact. Because of that, I believe trauma-informed approaches are essential not only in early intervention, but throughout a person’s life.
For me, Foster Care Fortnight is an important reminder of why listening to lived experience matters so much. It helps ensure conversations around fostering, adoption and care move beyond awareness alone and towards support systems that are relational, trauma-informed and built for the long term.
The Becoming a Fostering Family training programme prepares potential foster parents and enhances their understanding of attachment and therapeutic parenting.
