When a Child in Your Care Lies or Steals

Ask people what worries them about fostering and this one comes up quietly, usually at the end: what if they lie to me, and what if money starts going missing from my coat pocket. Fair worry. It is also one of the more workable problems in fostering, provided you know what the behaviour is for and what not to do in the ten minutes after you notice.

Please note: general information, not legal advice about any individual child. The legal points are correct as at 6 November 2026; see GOV.UK on the age of criminal responsibility. Follow your agency’s own recording procedures and talk to your supervising social worker about a particular child.

Lying is usually a child managing a risk

Very small children make things up because they are practising. A four-year-old who tells you there is a crocodile in the airing cupboard is not lying in any moral sense, and treating it as a character flaw does real damage. Older children lie for reasons that make sense once you know them. They want privacy. They are afraid of what happens if they ask. They are ashamed, or covering for a friend, or protecting someone they are frightened of. Our training material for carers also lists being bullied and feeling under high expectations, and both turn up more often in practice than defiance does.

That changes what you are solving. Read a lie as a test of your authority and you respond with pressure, which only makes the next lie better hidden. Read it as a child deciding the truth is the riskier option and you have something you can change. You can make telling you cheaper.

Why things go missing

Taking things has its own set of reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with wanting the object.

• Learned survival. A child who has gone without food does not trust there will be more tomorrow, so they take it and hide it. The commonest reason, and the most often misread.
• Buying a place. Sweets, vapes and cash at the school gates buy friendship fast, and a child who has moved three times wants friends fast.
• A debt. If someone older handed a child a phone or trainers, the debt is the hook, and money has to come from somewhere.
• Impulse, with no plan behind it. Common in younger children and where attention and impulse control are still catching up.
• Getting a reaction, when any reaction beats being ignored.

Very young children take things before they have grasped that ownership exists. Our training sheet puts that line at around four, which is a rough guide rather than a date in the diary.

The question to ask before you ring anyone

This is the part most articles skip, and the part that changes a child’s adult life. In November 2025 the Children’s Commissioner for England looked at children born in England between 2000 and 2002. Of the care-experienced children in that group, 27 per cent had ever received a caution or conviction, against 2.2 per cent of those never in care. Around ten times the rate. And of those ever found guilty of anything, 49 per cent had their first contact with the criminal justice system after they came into care. Their first offences were markedly smaller: criminal damage under five thousand pounds made up 15 per cent of them, against 8.4 per cent for other children.

Some of that is harm children carried in with them. A good deal of it is adults calling the police about something that would have been a row at the kitchen table in any other house. The national protocol covering this, published in 2018, asks professionals to consider whether a child’s behaviour would lead to an arrest if they lived with their family. That is the test. Before you report a missing twenty pounds as a theft, ask whether you would have reported it if this child had been born in your house. Usually the honest answer is no, and what is needed is a conversation and a written record, not a crime number.

The protocol is not law, and it shows: the Children’s Commissioner found it “lacks statutory power and is inconsistently applied”. So the question often falls to whoever is standing in the kitchen. That is you, and you are allowed to ask it.

What to do in the first ten minutes

Stay flat. Not warm, not cold. Flat.

Name what you can see and leave the accusation out of it. Our training material gives carers a line close to this: “I can see the toy has been broken. That’s a shame. Can you tell me what happened?” It asks about the event instead of demanding a confession, so a child who is not cornered has somewhere to go other than a bigger lie. If forty pounds has gone from a drawer, “forty pounds is missing and I need us to sort it out” gets you further than “did you take it”.

Then separate the two jobs. Repair is one: the money gets paid back from pocket money, the item goes back to the shop. Understanding is the other, and it happens later, sideways, on a car journey or while washing up. Write it down the same day, plainly. “Money taken from kitchen drawer, 12 October, repaid over three weeks from pocket money, child upset but engaged” is useful to everyone. A record that says “deceitful” is useful to no one and follows the child for years.

The dull things that lower it

Almost everything that reduces lying and taking is boring, which is why it gets skipped in favour of a serious talk.

• Lower the opportunity before you raise the stakes. Handbags off the hall table, cash out of the fruit bowl. That is not suspicion, it is removing a daily test the child keeps failing.
• Make food openly available. A labelled shelf or a snack box a child can raid without asking takes the point out of hiding it under a bed, as our guide to food and mealtimes in foster care explains.
• Pay pocket money on a fixed day and do not make it conditional on behaviour. A child with nothing in their pocket on a Friday has more reason to take something than a child with a tenner.
• Do not set traps. Leaving a marked note out to see what happens teaches a child one thing about you.
• Note the pattern. If things go missing the week before family time every time, that is worth telling your supervising social worker.

Underneath all of it is curiosity before correction. Our article on therapeutic parenting and PACE explains how that works day to day, and the piece on trauma and attachment explains why a child let down repeatedly expects to be caught rather than helped.

When it is a sign of something that needs help

Sometimes it is more than a habit. Persistent lying and taking, alongside aggression and months of rule-breaking, can point to a conduct disorder, which NICE puts at about 5 per cent of children aged 5 to 16 and which responds to treatment, mostly through work with the adults around the child. Lying looks different again in a child with ADHD. Our training material reads the lie there as a way of coping with something they cannot do yet, so promising a reward for finished chores can produce a claim that the chores are finished. Check first, then praise. Either way the route is the same: raise it with your supervising social worker, who can get a GP referral moving, and keep the recordings going, because the pattern in them is what professionals need. Our article on what to do when a child’s behaviour is hard to handle covers the next steps.

Numbers worth keeping in a drawer. Family Action’s FamilyLine, 0808 802 6666, is for parents and carers, so it is a place for you rather than the child. The NSPCC helpline, 0808 800 5000, or help@nspcc.org.uk by email, is for any adult worried about a child. Both change their opening hours from time to time, so check their websites before you ring. Childline, 0800 1111, is the number for the child.

You won’t have to do this alone

None of this is a solo exercise. Every Greater London Fostering carer has a supervising social worker who knows the household and the child, on the phone during the day and out of hours when something happens at eleven at night. You also get a 24-hour support line and regular supervision where things like this get picked apart properly. Your fee runs while a child is with you, whatever sort of week it has been. As at November 2026 that is 479.50 pounds a week for a child under 11 and 507.50 pounds for a child aged 11 or over, per child, with an enhanced fee of roughly 100 to 200 pounds a week more for higher-needs placements. The pay page sets out how that works and our article on the support carers receive covers the rest.

Ofsted inspected us from 21 to 25 July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements. The part that matters here is what carers said: that they could ring us about anything, including the things they were embarrassed about. You will not be judged for telling us money went missing. You will be judged, by us, on whether you told us.

Frequently asked questions

What happens if a child in my care is caught shoplifting?

It depends on what the police do next, which is why your supervising social worker should be your first call. The age of criminal responsibility here is 10. For children of that age and over, the Ministry of Justice’s guidance for youth justice services (updated January 2024) splits the options in two. A community resolution, no further action, a deferred caution or a deferred prosecution are informal and produce no formal criminal record. A youth caution or youth conditional caution is formal and does count. The guidance is blunt that formal outcomes “should not be routinely used with children committing first time and less serious offences”, so a first shoplifting incident does not have to end in a record. Ask the question.

Do I have to record it every time something goes missing?

Yes, and recording it is not the same as reporting a crime. Daily recording is part of the job: it is how patterns get spotted and how you protect yourself if anything is questioned later. Write what happened and what you did, not your theory about the child. Whether anything more is needed is a conversation with your supervising social worker, not a decision you make alone at nine at night.

Will I be blamed if a child takes money or breaks something in my home?

No. Things getting taken and broken is part of the job, and a carer who tells us early is doing what we want. You tell your supervising social worker, you agree a repair plan that fits the child’s age, and if there is real financial loss you raise it with us instead of absorbing it quietly. The carers who end up in difficulty are almost never the ones whose household had an incident. They are the ones who said nothing for three months.