Family Fostercare are launching a lending library of therapeutic books for our looked-after children, foster carers and foster families.
Books are good for us! Often a good story can reach us, whether child or adult, in a way that even the most well-intentioned advice can not. Reading and sharing a carefully chosen story book together can be a great way for looked-after children and foster carers to bond, and a very effective way for foster carers to help the children they care for understand changes or frightening events happening to them, and the strong emotions that can accompany them.
Over the years the individual Family Fostercare offices have amassed quite a good collection of fiction books for children and factual resources for foster carers to support their child development knowledge or give insight into a particular issue or difficulty they may have been experiencing with a placement. But it wasn't until this week that one of us - Jan Brannigan, Senior Supervising Social Worker with our Dudley office to be exact - had the bright idea of collating and expanding the collection to create a lending library of books for our fostered children and foster carers all around the country to use and benefit from.
The idea was enthusiastically received by Director Granville Orange, who sees this as a thoughtful added support service for our foster carers with the potential to enrich the quality of care provided to fostered children.
While we have been working out the mechanics of getting the lending library scheme up and running, Jan has been busy scouting out a good first addition to the collection. 'The Blinks' is a series of books for children written by child psychologist Andrea Chatten, which entwine strategies for emotional and behavioural development into magical stories for children to read with an adult or enjoy on their own. The books have great reviews and we are hoping they will make a fine addition to our growing library for our foster families.
We will be publishing our library catalogue on this website, which will hope will be a useful and interesting resource for our online visitors too.