Somewhere to Land
Every summer, four siblings fly to Italy. A villa near the beach, restaurants in the evening, water parks under an afternoon sun. Three or four weeks, every year, no exceptions.
Nothing about it looks like fostering, which is sort of the point.
For Sam and Jack, fostering siblings has always been about creating something that feels real, stable and permanent.
In more than five years of caring for the same children, they have never used planned respite care. When asked how they cope with being “always on”, the honest answer is that they stopped thinking of the children as placements a long time ago.
Theirs is a home. The children are part of the family. And when the family goes away in the summer, they all go together.
The instinct to build something real rather than something temporary runs through everything they do. It’s also, they’d argue, the whole job.
The advert that wouldn’t go away
Sam heard about fostering on the radio, mentioned it to Jack, and a conversation about looking after children started.
It made sense to them both. They had always assumed children would be part of their life somehow.
They were approved as foster carers in December 2019.
Then the world shut down.
One short placement came and went, and the pandemic stopped referrals in their tracks. But only for a while.
Learning what support means
Sam and Jack joined a large fostering agency to begin with. When placements did start to come, the pressure came with them – complex referrals and a strong steer to simply say yes to any and all of them.
There was little room to weigh up whether a match was right for the children, let alone for Sam and Jack.
So they moved to Little Acorns Fostering specifically to find the close-knit, family-first culture they wanted.
The difference showed up straight away, and it showed up in tone.
“They never judged us, and they never pushed us,” Sam says. “They listened first. And because it’s a small agency, everyone knows every case.”
Call on any given day and whoever picks up already knows your name and your situation. Referrals are filtered rather than dropped over in bulk. Limits are respected rather than tested.
Importantly, the therapeutic side of parenting is understood too – including why a child who has experienced trauma might respond differently to boundaries, rejection or simply being told “no”.
“There’s a real difference between being supported and being managed,” Jack adds.
Fostering siblings: all in
At the start of 2021, Sam and Jack took in two siblings who had been given notice elsewhere.
Two years later, when two more children from the same family needed a home, they took them too.
Four siblings, all long-term.
“For the first couple of years, we watched every tiny detail,” Sam says. “Figuring out what’s underneath the surface, trying to change something before it happened. It was exhausting, but it worked.”
Children who have experienced trauma, loss and disrupted relationships can find it difficult to trust that a new home – and the adults within it – will remain.
For Sam and Jack, the answer was consistency.
Everything they do runs on a single idea.
“The key is always attachment,” Sam says. “Consistency, routine, boundaries. Give a child those and they heal. They could push hard at the start. Then they relax, because they work out you’re not going anywhere.”
Keeping the four siblings together has also meant they have been able to share the next part of their childhood alongside one another.
What family looks like
Some of the assumptions Sam and Jack have had to work around had nothing to do with the children at all.
There were, for example, assumptions around the youngest – the only girl among the siblings – and whether she needed a woman’s touch or a female role model.
Sam and Jack have always made sure the full range of her needs are met. The children are integrated into their wider family, surrounded by their mums, sisters, aunts and other important people in their lives.
It goes to the core of what they provide: a house full of love, headed by two men who happen to be foster carers.
Their wider family supported them from all sides, and being a same-sex couple was never treated as a problem.
However, The Skills to Foster preparation did encourage them to think through what fostering would mean for them and for the children. That is exactly what good preparation should do.
The difference is you
The clearest proof of the work is in what professionals see now.
Early on, Sam and Jack sometimes felt they were being dictated to, scrutinised and told what to do in their own home before the local authority had really got to know the children.
Then the professionals spent more time with the family and saw it for themselves.
Settled children. Happy children.
Children the local authority remembered as chaotic four years earlier had become almost unrecognisable.
The scrutiny didn’t vanish, but it softened into something closer to trust.
Teachers noticed the changes too.
One school told them that staff can often identify a child in foster care very quickly – but with theirs, they couldn’t.
A young girl who arrived unable to read now reads close to her age. Children who arrived developmentally behind have grown once they felt safe, with one sibling catching up to another in height and maturity in a way that still surprises the people who see them week to week.
“You’re breaking a generational loop,” Jack says.
Children who have experienced difficult starts get the opportunity to move onto a different path and, perhaps one day, hand something different to whoever comes next.
That’s why it matters.
There continues to be a particular need for foster carers who can offer homes to sibling groups, as well as teenagers. Keeping brothers and sisters together, where it is right for the individual children, can provide continuity and an important connection to family at a time of enormous change.
Sam and Jack didn’t set out to create a perfect family.
They created somewhere safe. Somewhere consistent. Somewhere four siblings could remain together.
Somewhere to land.
If you think fostering siblings could be right for you, get in touch with Little Acorns. We can talk through what it involves, the space and support you may need, and whether fostering could work for your family.