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.