The BOUNCE Approach®
for Foster Carers

You said yes to a child you had read about in a few pages of notes, met briefly – if at all – before they moved in, and now share a home, a routine, and a life with.

You know things about this child that were never written down anywhere. You know what their face does in the second before a meltdown starts. You know which days are “off” before anything has even happened. You know that the version of them at the LAC review is not always the version of them at 7am on a school day.

And you also carry things nobody else quite sees. The exhaustion of being endlessly patient with a child who is testing whether you will give up like everyone else did. The strange loneliness of caring a child whose history belongs, in part, to other people. The low hum of always being slightly “on” – aware that how you respond in any moment might end up written into a report.

The BOUNCE Approach® will not take any of that away. But it might help make sense of some of it – and give you a way of understanding your child that does not depend on knowing their full story.

A child who has experienced separation from birth family, multiple moves, or early neglect or harm has often had to adapt – fast, and young – to a world that did not feel safe or predictable. Those adaptations do not switch off because the child is now somewhere safer. They show up in your home, in your car, at the dinner table, on the way to contact.

The shutdown when a routine changes. The rage that arrives faster than you can blink. The constant low-level vigilance, even when nothing is wrong. The way affection can sometimes tip into pushing you away, hardest, right when things are going well.

None of that is the child being difficult by choice. It is a nervous system doing what it learned to do, in a body that is still catching up to the fact that things might actually be different now.

The BOUNCE Approach® helps you see that – and gives you a way of responding that does not just manage the moment, but slowly helps your child’s body and brain learn something new.

The BOUNCE Approach® is a neurodivergent-affirming, trauma-informed framework that helps the adults around a child understand what may be driving their behaviour, their relationships, and how they see themselves.

For foster carers, it is not one more thing to “do” alongside everything else – the meetings, the paperwork, the reviews, the contact arrangements. It is a lens that sits underneath all of it, helping you make sense of what you are already living through every day.

It does not ask what is wrong with this child, or what is wrong with you as a carer.

It asks: what has this child learned to expect from the world so far – and what do they need from you now, to start learning something different?

Six foundations. One framework.

It helps make sense of behaviour that can otherwise feel personal – especially when a child seems to push hardest against the people trying hardest to help them.

It gives you a way to understand a child even when their history is incomplete, contradictory, or simply unknown.

It offers things you can actually do in the moments that matter most – not strategies that only work once a child is already calm, but ways of responding that meet them where they are, including the hard, three-in-the-morning, just-back-from-contact moments.

It gives you language that travels – into reviews, into conversations with social workers and schools, into PEP meetings – so you are not starting from zero every time you try to explain what is going on.

It helps you understand sensory needs, communication differences, and identity – which matters enormously for the many children in care who are also neurodivergent, whether or not that has ever been formally recognised.

And it is a reminder, on the days when nothing seems to be changing, that the relationship you are quietly building – through all the ordinary, repeated, unremarkable moments – is the thing that is changing everything, even when you cannot see it yet.