Life Books Help Foster Children Remember Their History

A Life Book is a combination of a story, diary, and scrapbook that has information about a foster child’s life experiences. Many children arrive without any mementos, pictures, or stories on their past. You can help them create on when they arrive in your home. 

Life Books have two important goals. The first goal is to help preserve memories and help kids in foster care make sense of their lives The Life Book is a place where foster children can express their feelings creatively, put their thoughts on paper, and keep different mementos from different experiences they have had. This can include pictures, poems, drawings, arts and crafts, report cards, stories and more. 

As a foster parent, you will often need to take the initiative, prompting the children in your house to save items for their Life Books and setting aside special times each week to work on them. Life Books should also be kept in mind when you are taking photographs or getting the photos developed. Be sure to take enough pictures or to order enough copies so that both you and your foster child can keep pictures of special events such as birthday parties, holidays and more. 

The second goal of a Life Book is to provide foster children with a connection to their past. Foster children often lack the family history that most of us take for granted. Many foster children never get to know their birth family members or hear birth family stories, and they often know almost nothing about their infancy. This is why the Life Book and proper documentation can be so important to them. 

Every piece of a person’s life is valuable. Pieces come together to make a whole, and foster children often have lots of pieces that they need assistance and support in putting together.