Life Books

Creating a life book is something all foster carers are asked to do. However, knowing that you are responsible for capturing a whole season of a little soul’s life can feel overwhelming. Using a life book template is a great way to get started. Our ‘All About Me: My Time in Foster Care’ template is designed to help foster carers start the process of recording important parts of the child/ young person’s time with them. Having a completed book to take with them into future placements can help a child build a better picture of their past and create a greater sense of self.

Working collaboratively with care-experienced young people, their parents-biological, foster, & adopted- and care professionals, we were able to create a template based around what young people feel is truly important. From there, we worked to design a product in which quality mirrored importance whilst acknowledging the considerable time constraints foster carers face. It was therefore important that we create a template that is easy to use and can be completed over varying periods of time.

Our LB templates are divided into three categories: Baby/Toddler, Children, & Teens. This is to reflect their changing interests and lifestyles, as well as the level of input they can offer to the project. All books contain pages dedicated to general information about the child, their interests, stories about them, their foster family, important people, next steps, a letter to them, and photos. We have purposely not included sections dedicated to specific milestones or events, which ensures each book can be completed fully, for any child, at any level, without any gaps.

Through our research, we found that care-experienced young people overwhelmingly preferred a hand-written life book, expressing that it ‘felt more personal’ and seemed as though carers had ‘put more thought into it ’, feeling it was closer to ‘what a birth family would provide’. As such, all templates have been designed to be printed and completed by hand.

More recently, we were invited to design a smaller number of life book templates for older individuals living within residential settings and those accessing dementia care services. Again, these too, were created collaboratively with a small group of residents.