Sharen and Lee's fostering journey from a lightbulb moment to family life

Read Sharen and Lee's video transcript

Sharen:  If you are passionate about making a difference to people, I think anybody can be a foster carer.

Lee: What we hope they feel, is loved and looked after and cared for.

Sharen: I did the snail thing to somebody.

Sheran: The thing that surprised me about being a foster carer is I think people don't understand it sometimes, and people make assumptions about you as a foster carer or the children that you're looking after. And we've been really lucky to have two amazing young people that we care for.

We were driving home from seeing family at Christmas three years ago, and it was just a bit of a light bulb moment when Lee and I were talking about fostering what our next steps in life were, we kind of thought, why not? And I've downloaded the form

Lee: And went from there. So we sort of applied and the rest is history. Here we are, okay,

Sharen: It was daunting, thinking, are we going to be good enough? Are we going to be able to do this?

Lee: When we first went through training, we were the only couple that worked

Sharen: It was difficult in terms of the process of being assessed.

Lee: Our social work has been great. She's been with us through the whole process. Our first placement didn't work out quite so well. The card put us on the back for a little bit with some doubts about, well, maybe this wasn't for us, but Jane was great. Kind of came out, talked us through it, and said, 'Okay, let's look at what does work for you'. But those fears pretty much went away, and the support you get from the social workers has been great.

Sharen: We started short term with the view that we would have, you know, sort of young people for a couple of months, maybe a couple of weeks. However, you know, we made a connection with the children that we look after now.

Lee: And I think probably a year down the line, got to the point where they just felt like they were part of the family. It made it an easy decision to say, 'Look, can we can we extend this out and go long term? It was important that we had our social worker. Had a care plan in place.

Sharen: The children we look after do have different types of additional needs.

Lee: They missed a lot of education growing up.

Sharen: It was a learning curve. Being a teacher did help, because I'm a massive advocate, obviously, for education, and know how important it is that if you get that right, that's a really, really good place to start.

I think children get stability from foster care. They get the opportunity to become the person that they should have been without the background that maybe they started from.

Sharen: Ah I'm your favorite, get in

Lee: Sheran's Your favorite. I'm the one that's just done your room, done your ironing, done your washing. But I take it all back. (laughing)

Child: I sorted my washing out.

Lee: It fills your life up. It's taking them down football, taking them to cadets, it's going to the shops every weekend, and it's just yeah, just family life.

Sharen: For me, it's about pushing them and encouraging them, because they can do anything. It doesn't matter that they are not biologically my children, I treat them like they are, and I have the same hopes and dreams for them as I would if they were my own.

I think we've become closer as a couple as a family, because we've got that shared investment in two young people that you know make a difference to our lives. It's not just one way. So yeah, sold.