How can social workers and neuro-diverse foster carers collaborate to provide the best support for a child or teen in need?

Building strong relationships between social workers and neuro-diverse foster carers can be challenging. With professionals often having no experience working with Autistic adults, trust can be difficult to initiate, and problems can seem insurmountable. Drawing from her own lived experience as a neuro-divergent foster carer, Megan Tanner explains how barriers can be broken down to establish a successful partnership with one sole aim: to create the best possible outcome for a child or teen in need.

Working to remove pre-conceptions and judgement surrounding neuro-diverse foster carers, this book is ideal reading for students and practitioners of Social Work and related courses, Disability Studies, Autism and Autistic studies, DEIB studies, Psychology, and social work policy makers.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Trigger warning
• Introduction
• Learning objectives
• 1 The benefits of having autistic foster carers
  • Why might autistic people make good foster carers?
  • Cognitive strengths
• 2 Perceptual differences
  • Attitude problem
  • Masking
  • Different initial premises
  • Attempting to understand
  • Predetermined expectations
  • Can autistics have a sense
of humour?
  • Echolalia
  • Reasonable adjustments
• 3 Executive functioning differences
  • What is executive functioning?
    • Working memory
    • Planning and organisation
    • Staying focused
    • Impulse inhibition
    • Time management
  • Reasonable adjustments
• 4 Social differences
  • The social aspect of fostering
  • Spoon theory
  • Social hangover
  • Sensory aspect
  • Small talk
  • Words for information
  • Info-dumping
  • Gossip
  • Reasonable adjustments
    • Events and occasions
    • A day trip out: too much – we will not have the spoons for it
    • Training sessions
    • Foster carer support groups
• 5 Truth differences
  • Gaslighting
  • Twisting
  • Triangulation
  • Intentional omissions
  • Projection
  • Name calling
  • Theories treated as fact
  • Labelling
  • Changing minds, or information, without telling anyone – making the new information the only information
  • Using threats or coercion
  • Disregarding verifiable facts
  • Misdirection
  • How this looks in practice 
as an autistic foster carer in 
social services
  • Reasonable adjustments
• 6 Rule differences
  • Is it or is it not a rule?
  • Policy and procedure rules
  • General rules on children
or teenagers
  • Timeframe rules
  • Communication rule
  • Reasonable adjustments
• 7 Autistic overwhelm
  • Meltdown, shutdown,
and burnout
    • Meltdown
    • Shutdown
    • Autistic burnout
  • Reasonable adjustments
    • Meltdown
    • Shutdown
    • Burnout
• Conclusion
  • Understanding
  • Stress
  • Empathy and double 
empathy issue
  • Equality and legality
    • Communication
    • Reciprocal social interaction
  • Some statistics
  • What do we want in a foster carer?
  • My top three wishes
• Recommended assignments and discussion questions
• References
• Recommended further reading
• Glossary
• Index

Megan Tanner is the Founder of Hear Their Roar charity and an NVR (Non-Violent Resistance) Parenting Consultant.