Those of you who are parents - how often do you offer emotional, financial or practical support to your children?
Those of you with regular contact with your birth-parents - how often do you receive emotional, financial or practical support from them?
If you are a former foster child - and even more so if you are a Children's Home survivor - life long adult role models ready, willing and able to offer help will be pretty much non existent.
When Ella and I sat down to think about what to write about for this week's blog entry we looked through our list of subscribers. By far the largest group are those who have little or no adults support in their lives. This means no "Bank of Mum and Dad", no weekly phone calls, no Grand Parents coming to visit. A lucky few maintained a close relationship with their former foster parents which is a great deal better than nothing but which doesn't approach the unconditional and never-ending love and concern that many birth parents offer their children. And then there were the handful who have been back in touch with birth parents. As Ella and I can promise you this seldom seems to end happily.
There are 4 so-called "grown-ups" living in our house. Between us we can muster - 2 birth parents who have vanished, 1 who finds any contact with her grand daughter to be "unendurable", 1 who considers a golf match more important than a pre-arranged trip to see his only child, 2 who now live overseas and two superstars.
Yet despite all this Ella and I have been lucky enough, via blind chance rather than skill on our part, also to have found a couple of 50+ year olds who have come to rescue more than once. I have said it before but a wide-ranging circle of friends is just so important.
Where we live there are a huge number of children in care (around 11000). Because of a lot of complicated stuff most of them will probably never get a chance to grow up in stable forever families. I think about those kids and what you wrote about a lot.
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