Yesterday I had the honour and the privilege of spending the day with a group of kinship carers - thinking together about the difficult things our children have experienced - and more importantly how we can support them to make sense of things.
Why is it important to share information from a time they were too young to remember? Aren't they better off not knowing? Why do we need to help our children to understand the 'why' of it all? Why is it important to help them to understand the impact that those early experiences have had and will continue to have? When do we bring these things up? How do we bring these things up? What if they don't want to know? What if we don't have the information they want and need?
We're not talking about one conversation. We're talking about many many conversations with varying amounts of detail and from different viewpoints as we navigate with them through different developmental stages.
Adopters, foster carers, and kinship carers all know this territory - often with several children in different places on their journey. But for kinship carers there's often the added challenge of being related in some way to the birth parents of the children in their care - and in many cases the children are still spending time with their birth parents.
No easy answers and so many difficult and painful stories honoured in the room.