Communicating With a Foster Child: What Actually Gets Through

You will have plenty of conversations that go nowhere. You ask how school was and get “fine”. You sit at the kitchen table, put your phone face down, and they suddenly need the toilet. Then three weeks later, halfway to Sainsbury’s with the radio on, they tell you the thing they have been carrying since March. That is not you failing at conversation. That is how it works.

Please note: general information for carers in England, not advice about a particular child. Correct at 7 September 2026. A child’s right to help in making their views heard comes from section 26A of the Children Act 1989. If you are worried about a child living with you, speak to your supervising social worker the same day.

Most of it happens sideways

Sit a child down opposite you, ask a direct question, and you have built an interview. Children in care have had a lot of interviews, with adults holding folders, in rooms they did not choose. So the format itself can close things down, whatever your intentions.

What works better is the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff, where talking is not the main event. Driving. Drying up. Walking the dog. The child can look away, stop and pick it up again ten minutes later without any of it being a big moment. Carers who have done this a while stop scheduling the important conversations and start making sure the week has enough of these gaps for one to land in.

The 93 per cent figure is wrong, and it still points somewhere useful

Plenty of training courses claim only 7 per cent of communication is the words, and the other 93 per cent is tone and body language. It comes from two small studies by Albert Mehrabian in 1967, one with 30 women listening to single words in different tones, the other with 37 women looking at photographs of faces. Mehrabian has since said that unless someone is talking about their feelings or attitudes, “these equations are not applicable”. The numbers were never about conversation. They were about how people resolve a mismatch between a word and a face.

The useful part still stands. When your words and your face disagree, a child who has learned to read adults for safety believes your face. Say “I’m not cross” through a jaw you are holding still and that is the message received. You cannot perform calm you do not have, so name the mismatch: I am annoyed about the kitchen, not with you, give me ten minutes.

Some children cannot yet say the thing

This is the part most carers are never told, and it changes how the whole subject looks. Many children in care have speech and language needs nobody has picked up. When the No Wrong Door service in North Yorkshire looked properly in 2016, 62 per cent of the children it worked with turned out to have communication needs, and only two had ever seen a speech and language therapist. That was one service on the edge of care, so treat it as a warning rather than a national rate. It is still a startling number.

An unmet communication need does not look like one from the outside. It looks like rudeness, or refusing to answer, or a child who kicks off when asked to do three things at once. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists describes children who “communicate through behaviour” precisely because the words are not available. If you have read our guide to what to do when a child’s behaviour is hard to handle, this is the same argument from a different direction.

The other half of it is age. Pitch your language at the child in front of you rather than the number on their birthday card: a ten-year-old who has spent years in survival mode may follow instructions like a much younger child on a bad day, and like a teenager on a good one. Our piece on what development to expect covers where those gaps come from.

What actually helps

• Get low, so you are not talking down at them.
• Give one instruction at a time, then ask them to say it back in their own words. Not as a test. As a check on you.
• Leave the pause alone. A child composing a hard sentence can take fifteen seconds. Most adults break at four.
• Reflect back what you heard before you respond: “so the worst bit was walking in late.” Getting it slightly wrong is fine. They will correct you, and that is itself a conversation.
• Say your own feelings out loud in small doses, and admit it when you get something wrong. A child who has never seen an adult apologise has no reason to think it is safe to be imperfect.
• Use a toy, a drawing or a film character as the way in for a younger child. Playing while talking is not a lesser kind of talking.
• Turn the television off rather than down, and put the phone in another room.
• Keep a predictable slot in the day that belongs to them: bedtime, or the walk back from school.
• If it gets heated, stop. Say you want to carry on later, then actually do it.

The habit underneath them all is curiosity rather than correction, the C in the PACE approach GLF carers are trained in. Where a disability or an additional need affects how a child communicates, the same principles apply with different tools, from Makaton to symbol cards. Our guide to fostering a child with a disability or additional needs covers where to ask.

The one promise you cannot make

A child will eventually ask you to keep a secret, usually just before telling you something important. You cannot say yes. Some things have to go to their social worker, and a promise made now is one broken within the hour, which teaches them the wrong lesson about adults.

What you can say is true and nearly as good: I will always listen, I will never be angry with you for telling me, and if I have to pass something on I will tell you first and say who to. If a child does tell you something serious, the NSPCC’s advice is to listen rather than investigate. Do not push for detail or ask leading questions. Write down what was said in their own words as soon as you can, do not confront anyone, tell them they were right to tell you, and take it to your supervising social worker.

When talking to you is not enough

Sometimes the thing a child wants to say is about the adults in charge, and you are one of them. That is when it matters that they have rights of their own, and that you are the person most likely to tell them.

• Every child in care in England can ask for a free independent advocate under section 26A of the Children Act 1989. The advocate works for the child, not the council or the agency.
• Coram Voice runs a national advocacy helpline, Always Heard, on 0808 800 5792, Monday to Friday from 9.30am to 6pm. It is free and does not appear on a phone bill.
• Childline is 0800 1111. It is free and open at any hour.
• Their independent reviewing officer has to find out their wishes and feelings before every review, and a child can ask to speak to them alone.

Bright Spots, the survey run by Coram Voice with the Rees Centre and answered by more than 9,000 children in care, found 86 per cent felt included in decisions at least sometimes. Read that “at least sometimes” carefully. It also found more than one in ten young people aged 11 to 18 hardly ever or never trusted their social worker. A child with somewhere else to take a complaint is less stuck, and pointing them towards it does not make you disloyal. It makes you look like you meant it.

You won’t have to do this alone

Nobody arrives at fostering already good at this. It is learned, mostly by getting it wrong in a car park and thinking about it later. Every GLF carer is trained in trauma and attachment, so you will understand why a child reacts as they do before you have to respond, and your supervising social worker knows your household well enough to think a conversation through afterwards. Someone is on the phone at any hour, including the evening a child says something that leaves you on the stairs.

Fostering also has to work financially. GLF pays a fixed weekly fee of 479.50 pounds for a child under 11 and 507.50 pounds for a child aged 11 or over, per child and while the child lives with you, plus an enhanced fee of roughly 100 to 200 pounds a week where a child’s needs call for it. Ofsted inspected us in July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements. Our page on becoming a foster carer sets out what the process involves.

Frequently asked questions

What do I do when a child refuses to talk to me at all?

Stop asking, and stay nearby. Silence from a child who has just moved in is usually sensible caution rather than dislike, and it lifts once enough ordinary days have gone past. Keep offering the sideways openings. If weeks go by with nothing, tell your supervising social worker: that can point to an unmet communication need rather than a mood.

Can I promise a child I will keep what they tell me private?

No. Some information has to go to their social worker, and a broken promise is worse than one never made. Say instead that you will always listen, that you will not be angry, and that you will tell them before you pass anything on.

A child says one thing to me and something different to their social worker. What now?

Say so plainly, and record both versions in your notes. Children often give different adults different pieces, testing what each one does with them. That is information rather than a lie, and it belongs in the record.

What about a teenager who only gives one-word answers?

Lower the stakes and shorten the exposure: lifts in the car, late-night toast, a programme you watch together with talking in the ad breaks. Teenagers talk when they are not being looked at. Our guide to fostering a teenager goes further.