How does a support team aid in sibling connections?
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Maintaining Sibling Connections

Siblings are often the closest relationships, besides parents, that children have during childhood.  Siblings share hopes, dreams, fears, troubles and life on a daily basis.  Sadly, for many children who enter foster care, sibling relationships are broken and sometimes permanently detached.  As one foster child put it, “When I left my little brother, it felt like a piece of my heart was taken. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get that piece back.” To learn more, read this article titled, “The Importance of Maintaining Sibling Connections in Foster Care.”
 
 

It’s important for foster or adoptive parents to maintain or re-establish sibling connections, and once they have county permission and information regarding the sibling’s placement they can begin to take steps toward maintaining sibling connections.  How can you as a support team member support sibling relationships?  
 
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Here Are Some Ways You Can Help:

With Parent Permission:

  1. Facilitate phone calls between the siblings.  Help the siblings find common grounds of interest, such as a favorite TV show or movie, a school subject they are both enjoy, or a hobby they both spend time doing.  They will have more to talk about if they identify commonalities.
  2. Agree to set up regular visits in a neutral setting such as a park, swimming pool, skating rink, or another fun, child friendly location.  Sharing experiences is key to the development and maintenance of relationships.
  3. Set up Skype or Facetime on the family’s computer or phone.
  4. Help the family to look at their home and physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological resources to evaluate what it would take to add the sibling to their family.
  5. Talk to the foster child about their siblings.  Many children don’t talk about their siblings because they don’t feel it is a “safe” topic but they do think about them.
  6. Take the child to the store to pick out a card for their sibling. Then help them write a letter to their sibling and mail it for them.  Help them send a card for every holiday and birthdays.
  7. Cover fees which allow the siblings to join things together like the same sports team, scouting group or children’s choir.
 
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View Past Support Team Newsletters
 
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January: Supporting Your Family Throughout The Year
 
 

Support Team: Fundamentals
 
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