Child Care Board Encourages Foster Parenting for Barbadian Children in Need

The Child Care Board (CCB) is encouraging Barbadians to consider becoming foster parents to scores of children living in Government’s children’s homes.

The board’s senior child care officer for adoption and foster care, Roxanne Sanderson, said there were more than 100 children in institutionalised care, with “approximately 78” of this number in residential care.

Sanderson revealed that 44 of those 78 children, who are between ages four to 17, were eligible for foster care. She said the Child Care Board would like to have people come forward and take on a fostering responsibility.

She pointed out that foster care differed from adoption, allowing foster parents to take children from Government institutions to live in their home for specified periods, while still being under the care and protection of the Government institution.

“Basically, it is a form of alternative residential care, with children living with families instead of in institutional care. It is a partnership between the board and families,” Sanderson said.

She said the CCB offered three types of foster parenting.

“You can have persons who want to do short term foster placement which does not exceed six months; there is kinship parenting which allows a relative of the institutionalised child to take that child into their home, whether it be a grandmother, a cousin or other relative; then there is the emergency foster parent who we will need at short notice to hold a child because that child has come in for emergency reasons.”

Sanderson said the board also offered long-term foster parenting which could go up to 18 months.

Foster care basically is a form of alternative residential care, with children living with families instead of in institutional care, as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child suggest. It is a partnership between the CCB and families, Sanderson explained.

However, she stressed the fostering process was stringent, filled with checks and balances, thorough investigation and scrutiny of people applying to be foster parents, hence the reluctance of many people to complete the application process.

“One of the challenges is that people don’t necessarily understand foster care,” Sanderson said. “Also, we find that persons want perfect children, but there is no perfect child in the system. We bring in children from various broken homes and various situations, because there are three ways a child can come into care – if a child was abused; as a place of safety; or the court may deem that they need to be in care.