If you’re thinking about fostering babies, it’s only natural to have questions about why they’re in care, rather than with their biological families. Children can enter care for a few reasons, but the most common are abuse and neglect.
Safeguarding decisions about where a child should live can happen at any point during their childhood if a concern about their welfare is raised. In some cases, they might happen before a child is even born.
Some babies will move into care alongside their siblings, whereas others may live in a foster home with a parent. And in rare cases, a newborn baby might be fostered on their own.
Join us as we take a closer look at why babies enter care at birth, how these decisions are made, and what this means for birth families.
Why babies enter care at birth
Social services will only remove a baby from their birth family as a last resort. In some circumstances, these choices are made before the child is born as part of early intervention and safeguarding decisions.
When concerns about a child’s welfare are raised, social services will look at the potential for trauma and risk factors for infants within the home to assess whether they need to intervene.
Here are some reasons newborns are placed in care at birth:
- Previous social services involvement: If the baby’s parents have had older children removed because they were unsafe to live in the home, social services might decide that it’s in the best interests of their unborn child to move into care as soon as they’re born to prevent any harm coming to them.
- Imprisonment: Although some prisons have mother and baby units, they’re not available in all prisons, and mothers have to be approved to be placed in one. When they’re not, and there is no other suitable caregiver, such as the father or a relative, the newborn baby will move into foster care.
- Substance misuse: If a mother continues to misuse substances while pregnant, then their child could move into foster care when they’re born.
- Domestic violence: If there is violence within the home, this puts a newborn baby at immediate risk, resulting in them being taken into care for their safety.
- Poor mental health: Newborn babies whose parents are suffering from severe mental health conditions might require immediate foster care when they’re born until their parents are well.
- Illness: If a mother becomes seriously ill, such as during childbirth, and there is no one suitable to care for their newborn baby, the child may need foster care until the mother is well enough to care for their child themselves.
- Abandonment: Although rare, some mothers might willingly relinquish their child for adoption or leave their baby at the hospital or somewhere else soon after birth. These babies will move into foster care while suitable adoptive parents are found.
- Parenting capacity: If there are concerns about parenting capacity, the best course of action may be that the mother and/or father move into a foster home with their newborn baby in a parent and child arrangement.
How safeguarding decisions are made
When a safeguarding concern is flagged, either before or after a child is born, a lot goes on behind the scenes to understand the parents’ circumstances and decide on the next steps for the baby’s care.
Local authority (LA) social workers lead investigations and assessments, with the input of other relevant professionals, such as doctors, the police, and childcare providers. If they believe a child is at serious risk, they’ll immediately remove them from their birth family before placing them in an emergency foster home.
What is emergency foster care?
Emergency fostering is a temporary arrangement, lasting between a few days and a few weeks and is the most common type of foster care a baby will first experience. Local authorities (LA) will try to find a suitable home for a baby in their own pool of foster parents, but if they can’t, they’ll refer the child to an independent fostering agency, like us here at FCA.
If you want to provide an emergency foster home for babies, you need to be prepared to welcome them at a moment’s notice, which could be during the day, at night and on weekends. You’ll also need to be comfortable with uncertainty about when a baby will arrive and when they’ll move on, as emergency fostering is primarily there to ensure a child’s safety while the local authority completes their assessments.
What happens next?
Local authority assessments may lead to an interim care order, which means the LA can make plans for a child’s care during court proceedings, such as short-term foster care, kinship care or parent and child fostering.
In other cases, a child may return home following investigations, and the family will be offered additional support.
If court proceedings go ahead, once they conclude, the baby will either return home, live with extended family or be adopted. It’s unlikely that they’ll be fostered long-term, unless they’re part of a sibling group.
Taking babies to family time arrangements
If you become an emergency or short-term foster parent for a baby while court proceedings happen, part of your role will be to take them to family time meetings.
Supervised contact with the birth family can happen as often as two to five times a week when reunification is a possibility.
This means you need to feel comfortable meeting birth parents regularly, often travelling and sometimes at a distance, and remaining non-judgemental, alongside having a schedule flexible enough to facilitate these arrangements.
Understanding birth family circumstances
It can be very easy to blame biological parents for the circumstances that led their newborn baby into care. However, things are rarely ever black and white.
Some parents want to be there for their children, but they just can’t for whatever reason. Others may have had difficult childhoods themselves, which means they don’t know what healthy parenting looks like. And in some cases, they may have had parenting unexpectedly sprung on them and don’t really know what to do.
Although it might be hard, having empathy for birth families when fostering newborns is essential – regardless of what has happened, they’re human and could be feeling guilt, shame, and grief about losing custody of their child.
When you drop your foster child off at birth family contact, you aren’t there to judge; you’re there to provide the care that their child needs while they can’t.
Read our Supporting Babies and Birth Families article to learn more.
Could you foster a child?
If you’d like to learn more about fostering a newborn baby, check out our Understanding the Reality: Fostering Babies article. You’ll discover what a baby actually is in foster care, the most common types of baby fostering, and the practical and emotional realities of choosing this age group.
You can also speak to a member of our knowledgeable team by calling 0800 023 4561 or submit your details via our online form, and they’ll answer any and every question you have about starting your fostering journey.
