REDCAR & CLEVELAND BOROUGH COUNCIL - Kind-hearted couple win ‘Foscar’ award for dedication to vulnerable children

IT’S hard to believe that Mike and Lian Cox, current holders of Redcar and Cleveland’s ‘Foscar’ (foster care) award once considered themselves failures in the role.

“We thought, ‘well we have three kids of our own, we don’t need training,’” said Mike, a full-time foster carer from Brotton. “Boy, did we get that wrong! And when it didn’t work out like we thought it would in our heads, we thought we were failures.”

Mike explained that he and Lian, who were running the Fine Food sandwich shop in the village at the time, became foster carers in 2018. “We had a lad who came to us and stayed some time but he got into trouble and it ended up not working out. We were close to giving up.

“But we hadn’t failed. Not really. We’d given him a home, kept him safe, given him a couple of life lessons, some good memories in his childhood. That’s not failure. You have an idealistic notion that you’re going to get him to college and all that, but you have to take into account other factors.

“We made mistakes. If he got in trouble at school, we’d ‘double punish’, as we did our own children, when he got home. You learn not to do that.

“My message to anyone else considering fostering, is get training, get support…and don’t think you’re being a failure if it gets hard. You’re doing great work.”

Lian, a teaching assistant, agrees. “We had a message from our second foster child just the other day, who stayed with us a long time. She said, she wanted some comfort and was making, ‘Mike’s chilli.’ She had a happy memory of making chilli with him and was recreating it. It’s a small, everyday, thing – but it’s an example of how you give them little things to cope with life.

“She’d fallen in with a bad crowd and made mistakes and, when it all came out what she’d being doing, it turned out she was ashamed to tell us. She wanted to move on rather than think she’d let us down. But she hadn’t, of course. We were here to help.

“It’s not easy, but you hang on to the positive side. You think, ‘maybe we’ve helped, maybe we’re breaking a cycle’. But sometimes it is enough to give them some good times and keep them safe as you can.

“You think of all the things you would do differently - you never stop learning. When we got the Foscar Award it felt great, you think, ‘well we must have done something right to get this recognition.’”

The couple, who had spoken to other foster carers in support groups, have also provided respite, emergency and short-term care to a number of children and stress that foster care is a good option for lots of different types of people with different types of fostering available, including for people who work full time.

They also stressed that some of the obstacles people think are involved in fostering should not necessarily put anyone off. “People might think of the money side, but you do get some money,” said Mike. “We never knew about that really until we got started, and I do not think you can really be a foster carer for just that reason – it’s about giving support to a child,” says Mike. “But knowing that there is a financial side might take away a worry, a reason for someone not to do it. The other thing is the process of becoming a foster carer can put people off. In fact, I would say to embrace it, get as much advice as you can to do it as well as you can, while accepting you’re not going to be perfect.

“It is an extremely important job. A chance to make a big difference.”