Understanding Trauma and Attachment: How Foster Carers Help a Child Feel Safe

One of the questions people ask us most often, usually near the end of a first phone call and usually in a lowered voice, is some version of this: what if the child has been through something terrible and I don’t know what to say? It’s a fair question. Most children come into care because something went wrong at home, and that leaves a mark. The good news is that helping a child recover is not about saying the perfect thing. It’s about being steady, and being there tomorrow as well.

Please note: this page is general information about caring for children who have had difficult early experiences. It isn’t medical advice or a diagnosis. If you’re worried about a child’s mental health, speak to their social worker and GP; the NHS and services such as CAMHS can assess and support a child properly.

What we mean by trauma

Trauma isn’t the event itself. It’s what happens when an experience overwhelms a child’s ability to cope with it, and there’s nobody around to help them make sense of what happened. Social workers often use the phrase adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, to describe the events involved: neglect, physical or sexual abuse, seeing violence at home, losing a parent. Plenty of children live through frightening things and come out the other side, because someone safe was holding their hand. Trauma tends to grow in the gap where that person should have been.

The numbers give you a sense of how common this is among children in care. At 31 March 2025 there were 81,770 children looked after in England, and 67 per cent of them were living in foster families. Leaving aside unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who come into care for different reasons, 73 per cent were looked after because of abuse or neglect. Those are Department for Education figures, and they’ve been broadly stable for five years.

Why attachment matters

Attachment is the bond a baby builds with the person who looks after them, and it works like a rehearsal for every relationship that follows. When a baby cries and someone comes, feeds them, changes them, talks nonsense at them, the baby learns something enormous: I matter, people come back, the world is basically all right. When nobody comes, or when the person who comes is sometimes loving and sometimes frightening, the child learns a different lesson.

Children carry those lessons into your house. A child who has learned that adults are unpredictable may watch you constantly, tracking your mood, working out whether today is a safe day. Psychologists call this hypervigilance; you’ll probably just notice that they flinch when you drop a saucepan. Other signs are easy to misread as rudeness or naughtiness. Not knowing how to accept affection. Panicking about small mistakes. Anger that arrives from nowhere and leaves just as fast. Lying about things that don’t need lying about.

None of it is aimed at you. That is worth repeating on the hard days, because it certainly feels personal at the time.

Therapeutic parenting: high structure, high nurture

The approach most fostering agencies now use is called therapeutic parenting, and the shorthand for it is high structure with high nurture. Structure means the child knows what happens next: tea at six, bath, story, bed, same tomorrow. Predictability does a lot of the healing work on its own, because a child who can guess what the evening holds doesn’t have to stay on guard through it. Nurture means the warmth wrapped around that structure, so the routine feels like care rather than control.

Alongside those two, five habits do most of the heavy lifting:

• Put safety first, in the widest sense: physical safety, but also emotional safety.
• Make connection the priority, especially after things have gone wrong.
• Don’t take the behaviour personally.
• Stay calm and stay positive, which is easier when you’ve had support and sleep.
• Expect this to take a long time. Older children have had more years of learning that adults let you down.

Progress in this work is rarely a straight line. A child settles beautifully for six weeks, then a contact visit or a birthday knocks everything sideways, and you wonder whether any of it stuck. It did. Recovery goes in loops.

PACE, in plain English

PACE stands for playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. It came from the clinical psychologist Dan Hughes and sits at the heart of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, and there’s a good plain-language explanation on the DDP Network website. Think of the four letters as tools rather than steps. You won’t need all of them at once and there’s no correct order.

Playfulness takes the temperature down. If bath time turns into a battle every night, a silly bath song can end the standoff faster than another instruction will. Acceptance means letting a child’s feelings be real without arguing with them. When a nine-year-old shouts “you hate me”, the instinct is to say “of course I don’t”, which lands as a contradiction. Something like “I can see why it might feel that way, and I’m going to keep showing you how I really feel” leaves the door open.

Curiosity is asking, and meaning it: what were you thinking about just then? A child who has been talked at rather than listened to notices immediately when an adult is genuinely interested. Empathy is the one that costs you something, because it means sitting with a child’s pain without rushing to fix it. “Thank you for telling me. I’m so sorry that happened to you” is often the whole intervention.

One firm rule goes with all of this. Don’t invite a child to talk about their trauma unless their social worker or therapist has agreed it. Opening up the past before a child is ready can set their recovery back, and it isn’t your job to carry that decision alone.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

Day to day, therapeutic parenting is much less dramatic than it sounds. It’s noticing that meltdowns always come at half past three and moving the snack earlier. It’s writing down what happened before an outburst so you can spot the pattern, and telling your supervising social worker what you noticed. It’s keeping your own reactions readable, so the child can tell why you’re pleased or frustrated and doesn’t have to guess. It’s the ordinary business of everyday fostering life, done with a bit more thought about why.

School deserves a mention here, because a child who is anxious at home is usually anxious in a classroom too, and the tiredness that follows a bad night shows up in a maths lesson. Working closely with teachers and the designated teacher for looked-after children makes a real difference, and we’ve written separately about how foster carers support children at school.

Looking after yourself is part of the job

You cannot stay calm for a dysregulated child if you are running on empty. Carers who last are the ones who let other people in, whether that’s a supervising social worker they can ring at any hour or another carer who has been through the same week. Compassion fatigue is real and it creeps up quietly, usually as irritability and flatness rather than anything dramatic. Naming it early, in supervision, is a sign of a skilled carer rather than a struggling one.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody expects you to arrive knowing any of this. Every new GLF carer completes Skills to Foster preparation training before approval, and in England all newly approved carers work through the Training, Support and Development Standards within their first 12 months, with a supervising social worker alongside them. After that the training keeps coming: attachment, trauma, therapeutic parenting, PACE, plus whatever a particular child needs. We’re a small agency, so your supervising social worker knows your household and your children by name, and there’s someone on the end of the phone at three in the morning when it all goes wrong.

The financial side is straightforward too, because worrying about money makes everything else harder. GLF pays £479.50 a week for a child under 11 and £507.50 a week for a child aged 11 or over, paid per child for as long as the child is with you, with an enhanced fee of roughly £100 to £200 more a week for placements with higher needs. You can read the full breakdown on our foster carer pay page.

England needs more people willing to do this work. Ofsted counted 56,345 approved mainstream foster carers in March 2025, down 1 per cent in a year and 12 per cent since 2021, and The Fostering Network estimates that around 5,000 more fostering families are needed. Children who have been let down by adults need adults who keep turning up. That’s the skill. Everything else, we teach you.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a psychology background to care for a child who has experienced trauma?

No. Most GLF carers came from something else entirely: nursing, retail, driving, raising their own children. What matters is that you can stay calm, keep a routine and accept help. The theory is covered in Skills to Foster training before approval and in the Training, Support and Development Standards during your first year.

What is PACE?

PACE stands for playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy. It’s an attitude developed by the psychologist Dan Hughes for adults caring for children who have experienced trauma or attachment difficulties, and it’s used across UK fostering and adoption.

Should I ask a child about what happened to them?

Not on your own initiative. Let the child lead, listen if they choose to tell you, and never start that conversation without agreement from their social worker or therapist. Raising it too early can set a child’s recovery back.

What if I get it wrong?

You will, sometimes. Every carer does. Repairing things afterwards, calmly and without shame, teaches a child something they may never have seen at home: that a relationship can survive a bad moment.

Where can I get help if a child seems to be struggling?

Start with your supervising social worker, who can raise it with the child’s social worker and the agency’s health team. A GP referral to CAMHS may follow, and therapies such as play therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy can help. Your steady care at home matters as much as any of it.