The twelve days of Christmas: Kingston University academic expert reflects on supporting children in care

Associate Professor of Social Work at Kingston University Yvalia Febrer, who is also a foster carer and kinship carer, reflects on how challenging the festive period can be for children in care.

When people talk about winding down towards the end of the year, it's that feeling of well-earned rest when Christmas finally arrives that gets you through the chaos leading up to it. The impending Terry's chocolate orange-induced coma set against the familiarity of a film seen a hundred times before. An exhaustion that is almost relaxing in its own way, knowing everything went perhaps not to plan, but went all the same.

For most children, they too enjoy this calm after the storm of excitement that is Christmas morning. For many, of course, there is a stress and unrest that eats away at that childhood joy, not just at Christmas but year-round. Speaking as a social work academic, the experiences of children suffering abuse and neglect are fairly well researched and reported, and for those where such abuse draws them permanently away from their families and homes, we tend to focus on their ‘poor outcomes', especially when it comes to education. What gets little to no attention, however, is the increased moves that children in care are subjected to over the Christmas and New Year period.

At the time of the year most fervently and commercially associated with family and togetherness, children in care are being bumped around even more than usual. A freedom of information request to all Local Authorities in 2022 by the charity for children in care, Become, found that, on average, almost 80 young people were forced to move each day over Christmas. The ‘stressful' festive season most of us love to complain about pales beyond comparison when pitted against these children's daily reality.

Having to pack your belongings at a moment's notice, being driven by a stranger to another stranger's house (the social workers covering the Christmas period are called ‘Skeleton staff', and the placements are ‘emergency' placements). The grimness of being discarded like Christmas cracker wrappers during the most celebrated nuclear-family fest is certainly more akin to Halloween than it is to Christmas.

Knowing you're an imposter for a day, that no one was expecting you, no one has spent weeks preparing joy and cheer for you, and that you'll move again the next day, or perhaps the day after that. This is not the exhausted calm that others can settle into after the King's Speech, nor the familiarity or predictability that brings comfort collapsed on the sofa. This is an endless exhaustion that keeps you awake, an alertness to strange and fleeting surroundings that forces vigilance.

Someone else's home (again), the smell of their house, the food they've made and the way they've made it, the customs they keep and the habits they hold – all of this you're required to enter into at a moment's notice and then to leave. And if Christmas is sensory, New Years is existential: New Year's resolutions, plans for the year ahead, purposefulness, reflection, and most poignantly - control over one's destiny. These are the luxuries we don't even realise our familiar and predictable Christmas has afforded us.

Since the new Government came in there has been coverage about the state of the children's residential care sector. The simple fact that high-net worth individuals were being encouraged to invest in children's homes due to sizeable profits, with almost 40 per cent of homes run without anyone in charge, was surely enough for a modern-day remake of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The private profiteering from children at their most vulnerable almost beggars belief. Dickens' words "For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas" sadly does not ring true over the twelve days of Christmas for countless children who find themselves in care.

If we have one Christmas wish and make just one New Year's resolution, let it be to find our way back to caring for children the way they should be cared for, all year round: not for profit, but for love.

• Kingston University is currently researching children’s experiences in children’s homes, in conjunction with the National Children's Bureau.
• Kingston University is also launching a new course from September 2025 to train those working in residential care in collaboration with Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust. For more information explore Graduate Diploma in Residential Work (Children's) or email [email protected].