Acceptance
Caregiving dimension three
Acceptance is the third of five caregiving dimensions that together form the Secure Base Model. This article highlights how it can be applied to your role as a carer and the likely developmental benefits for your foster child.
Building your foster child’s self-esteem.
The Importance of Acceptance
To feel accepted, unconditionally, by their caregiver, is a basic need of looked after children. It is a vital dimension of the caregiving cycle. It could be argued that, unless this aspect of caring for a child is satisfactorily accomplished, little progress will be made in the relationship.
What is Your Role in This?
You, as the caregiver, will need to find ways of conveying to your foster child a feeling that they are valued for who they are; for their whole being, including any difficulties, they might present. they must feel accepted for the ‘challenging’ aspects of their personality, as well as the ‘good’ traits.
This is a ‘tall-order’, as they may exhibit behaviour which you don’t like or condone, but which must not detract from your commitment to accepting them. It will not always be easy but, by demonstrating this all-embracing acceptance, they will experience increasingly positive feelings of self-esteem.
This diagram illustrates how acceptance works within the caregiving cycle.
How Will This Help Your Foster Child?
They will come to believe themselves worthy of receiving love, and of being helped and supported by their carers. They will also learn to see themselves as able to deal with painful experiences, criticisms and personal sadness.
How Does This Aspect of The Caregiving Cycle Fit in with ‘Availability’ and ‘Sensitivity’?
This dimension is an extension and development of the qualities of availability and sensitivity. The child needs to learn to trust their own feelings and to control their behaviours so that they come to accept any praise offered by their caregiver, believing that they are a worthwhile person in their own right and deserving of praise where appropriate.
With increased self-esteem, they will grow in confidence. They will be equipped to welcome, and utilise, the opportunities for growth which are offered to them.
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Why Might a Child Lack Self-Esteem and Feel Worthless?
Sadly, the child who must be cared for may have experienced such negative forms of family life that they regard themselves as somehow responsible for all the hurt, anguish and violence within their birth family. This is a kind of ‘magical thinking’ which instills in the child a resulting false belief that they are bad, dangerous and deserving only of punishment.
How Will This Affect a Child's Self-Image?
Such a child will feel worthless and lack self-esteem. Their early experience of parenting might have been lacking in warmth and acceptance and their home may have been a frightening place for them. They will wonder if they are loveable and if they ‘deserve’ your love, care, and attention.
They might also wonder whether the love and acceptance you are so willing to show them, might depend on whether they are ‘good’. Will it disappear if they are naughty or needy? Also, they may have experienced other separations from familiar people and places. This will have increased their feelings of insecurity and anxiety.
With so many doubts and negative feelings about themselves, they will find it very difficult to function confidently in the world. Not feeling loveable, and not having experienced warmth and acceptance in their early life, they will never have learned that such acceptance can be theirs, no matter what.
What Will Your Foster Child Have Learned to Expect?
A child who has lived with low self-esteem, a feeling of worthlessness and a lack of acceptance, will expect rejection and failure. This expectation within your foster child will often produce the very behaviour that is likely to encourage the result they most fear.
How Will This Impact on You?
You will need to focus on the fact that, however challenging and stressful the situation might become, your foster child needs, above all, to feel valued and accepted by you. You must also guard against becoming emotionally overstretched by remembering to value and accept yourself. You might welcome support at this time and the reassurance that it’s their background which is making life difficult within your family. It will be helpful if you can be encouraged to recognise your strengths and the skills you have learned and to seek support.
Something to Remember
It is important to remember that, as a caregiver, you are not expected to be perfect! You are trying your best, you are working hard at establishing a good relationship with your foster child, but you can sometimes get it wrong, or adopt an approach which doesn’t quite work out. Don’t resist asking for help or advice and accept support and any further training offered.
By accepting advice and furthering your own knowledge and skills, you will regain your confidence and recapture your own self-esteem. You can be helped to feel positive about your own abilities and in turn promote greater self-esteem in your foster child.
Finding a Balance
A positive approach does not mean that you must abandon behavioural boundaries or give up on goal-setting. You will want your foster child to not only feel accepted within your family but to find acceptance in the wider society. Somehow you will need to find a balance; while promoting acceptance of them by their peers, and within the community generally, you will also need to help them to modify, or eliminate, unacceptable behaviour.
All this might sound pretty daunting! It can be hard work helping a child to gain self-esteem and to begin to feel they are acceptable; that being loved and valued does not depend on being ‘perfect’. Some foster children might always struggle to accept themselves, however sensitive and accepting you are in your care of them.
However, any small amount of progress is worthwhile. The healthy development of the child you are caring for depends so critically on his level of self-esteem. The degree and quality of your acceptance will play a huge part in this.
Acceptance within the Secure Base Model focuses on how you can help build your foster child’s self-esteem. The next caregiving dimension ‘Co-operation‘ is about helping them to feel effective.
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