Therapeutic Parenting and PACE: What It Actually Means for Foster Carers

If you have read anything about fostering lately, you will have run into the phrase “therapeutic parenting”. It has a clinical ring to it, and it puts people off before they ever pick up the phone, because it sounds like something you would need a psychology degree to attempt. You would not. The best known method for doing it, PACE, was built for ordinary carers in ordinary kitchens, and most of it comes down to how you handle one difficult ten minutes.

Please note: this page is general information for people thinking about fostering, not clinical or therapeutic advice. Decisions about a particular child’s therapeutic support sit with their social worker and the professionals involved in their care. Payment figures are GLF’s rates at the time of writing (August 2026) and national statistics are for the year ending 31 March 2025.

What therapeutic parenting actually is

Therapeutic parenting is high structure and high nurture at the same time, and that pairing is the whole idea. Family life tends to tip one way or the other when things get hard: either the rules tighten and the warmth drains out of the house, or the warmth stays but the routine collapses and nothing feels predictable any more. A child who has been let down by adults needs both at once. They need to know that tea is at six and that bedtime is bedtime, and they need to know that the adult saying so still likes them at half past nine when it has all gone wrong.

GLF’s own training material sets out six things to hold on to:

• keep structure and nurture high together, not one at the expense of the other
• put safety first, every time
• make connection the priority
• do not take a child’s behaviour personally
• stay calm and stay positive
• treat it as a long-term commitment rather than a fix

The fourth is the hardest, and nobody who tells you otherwise has done it. When a nine-year-old tells you that you are the worst thing that ever happened to them, the sentence lands somewhere real. Therapeutic parenting does not ask you to stop feeling that. It asks you to notice the words are about the child’s history rather than about you, and to keep your voice steady while you do.

Where PACE comes from

PACE stands for playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. It was developed by Dan Hughes, the American clinical psychologist behind Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, and it sits at the centre of how DDP-trained therapists work with children who have experienced early trauma or difficulties with attachment. The DDP Network describes it as a way of being with a child that is modelled on how parents naturally communicate with babies, before words are doing any of the work.

Treat the four parts as separate tools rather than a sequence. You do not need all of them in any given moment, and you can reach for them in any order. Some evenings you will use one and forget the rest, which is fine.

Playfulness

A light, relaxed, sometimes funny approach lowers a child’s defences faster than reasoning does. If bath time is a battle, a daft bath song takes the standoff out of it. The point is not to be entertaining; it is that a lighter tone makes it easier for a child to accept something they were braced to resist. The DDP Network is clear that this one has limits. Playfulness belongs to the small skirmishes, not to a serious incident where a child needs you calm and serious.

Acceptance

Acceptance means taking a child’s thoughts and feelings as they are, without judging them. You can accept the reason behind a behaviour without agreeing the behaviour was all right. A behaviour can be bad while the child is not.

The example GLF uses in its carer training is a good one. A child says “you hate me”. The instinct is to correct them: “no I don’t.” Try instead, “I can see why you might think that. I am going to do my best to show you that I love you.” One answer argues with the child’s inner world. The other stays alongside it.

Curiosity

Curiosity is wondering aloud rather than interrogating. “What do you think was going on for you then?” invites a child to look at their own reaction with you instead of bracing for a verdict. Asked in the wrong tone, the same words become a cross-examination, so this is one to practise.

Empathy

Empathy is staying present while a child is distressed, rather than rushing to fix it or leaving the room. “Thank you for telling me that. I am so sorry you went through it. That must have been very hard,” said after a child has shared something painful, does more than any solution would. Repeated over months, it teaches something a child in care may not have learned yet: that a difficult feeling can be brought to an adult and survive the trip.

The one rule to hold on to

There is a line in GLF’s training material that carers remember long after the rest: do not open up a conversation about a child’s trauma unless their social worker or counsellor has agreed to it. A well-meant question at the wrong moment can set a child’s recovery back, because they were not ready to go there and now they have.

Being curious about today’s behaviour is your job. Excavating what happened to them at five is not, and it never falls to you alone. If a child starts to tell you something, you listen, you do not press, and you pass it on to the people whose job it is to decide what happens next. Knowing where that line sits is something you learn in training and go over with your supervising social worker, and our guide to how trauma and attachment affect children in care covers the background to it.

What all this looks like on a wet Tuesday

Theory is tidy. Tuesdays are not. A ten-year-old who has had a bad afternoon at school refuses to come off the tablet, kicks the door frame on the way past, and shouts that this is not his house anyway. Nobody is hurt. The door frame is fine.

The reflex is a sanction and a lecture. The therapeutic version is slower and much less satisfying in the moment. You keep the boundary, because the tablet still goes off at seven. You skip the lecture, because he already knows. Later, over toast, you say something like, “That was a rough one. School was hard today, I think.” He shrugs. You leave it. Three days later he mentions that a boy in his class said something about his mum, and that is the conversation you were waiting for. You only got it because you did not chase it on Tuesday.

Nothing about that evening looks therapeutic from the outside. That is rather the point. Most of fostering is made of moments this small, which is why our page on what fostering involves day to day spends more time on routines and school runs than on drama.

A note on the language

You will also meet the term “adverse childhood experiences”, which covers potentially traumatic events between birth and seventeen: abuse, neglect, violence at home, the death of someone close. NHS Safeguarding advises against shortening it to “ACE”, because people who lived through those experiences have asked professionals not to. Small thing. Carers notice that kind of care with words, and so do children.

Nobody does this perfectly

You will lose your patience. You will say the flat “no I don’t” instead of the good answer, probably on a day when you have had four hours’ sleep. Therapeutic parenting is not a performance you either pull off or fail; what counts is coming back afterwards, saying you got that wrong, and carrying on. Children who have been let down before learn more from watching an adult repair something than from watching an adult get it right first time.

The exhaustion is real too, and it has a name: compassion fatigue. GLF’s training covers it directly, because a carer running on empty cannot offer a child a calm face. Looking after yourself is part of the role.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody expects you to arrive knowing any of this. You learn it through the Skills to Foster course before you go to panel, then through the Training, Support and Development Standards, which newly approved carers in England complete within twelve months of approval. Alongside that you have a supervising social worker who knows your household, out-of-hours support for the evenings when it kicks off at ten past nine, and other GLF carers who have sat where you are sitting. We are a small agency on purpose, and it does feel more like an extended family than an institution.

The need is not abstract. At 31 March 2025 there were 42,190 fostering households in England looking after roughly 54,820 children, and only 3,050 households were new to fostering across that whole year. London needs people who can offer a spare room and a steady week.

Fostering is paid work, and we say what we pay: £479.50 a week for a child under 11 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, with an enhanced fee of usually £100 to £200 a week more where a child has higher needs. The figures are on our page about what GLF foster carers are paid. If you are wondering whether your circumstances rule you out, they probably do not; becoming a foster carer is open to single people, renters, people over sixty and people who have never worked with children.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to be trained in PACE before I can apply to foster?

No. You learn it after you enquire, not before. The Skills to Foster course covers the thinking behind it before you go to panel, and your supervising social worker keeps working on it with you afterwards. Plenty of approved carers came to fostering from retail or driving rather than from anything to do with psychology.

Is therapeutic parenting the same as being soft on behaviour?

No, and this is the most common misreading of it. Structure stays high. Bedtimes and screen limits still hold. What changes is that you accept the feeling behind the behaviour while still holding the boundary, rather than treating the feeling as something to argue the child out of.

Does PACE work with teenagers?

Yes, though it looks different. Playfulness with a fifteen-year-old is dry humour and shared jokes rather than bath songs, and curiosity has to be offered lightly or it reads as prying. Empathy tends to matter most, and often lands best sideways: in a car, on a walk, with no eye contact required.

How much do GLF foster carers get paid?

£479.50 a week for a child under 11 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, paid per child while a child is placed with you. Some placements attract an enhanced fee, usually £100 to £200 a week more, depending on the child’s needs.