Description: A Life Explored provides therapeutic childcare for children who have had difficult starts in life, and for a variety of reasons are unable to live with their families. With three houses located in Fife on the east coast of Scotland, we specialise in helping kids to heal from past trauma and rebuild their lives. Each of our homes are designed for two children to receive one-on one care and support from a team of caring adults. Our culture draws from attachment theory and trauma infused care around the central task of a “re-parenting” relationship between child and adult. Our interventions and support plans reflect the unique needs of each child and our helping teams provide proactive, age-appropriate relationship based care through modelling, acceptance, reflecting and ensuring that our children feel loved and loveable.
Our core values
- To have courage and be kind
- Keep children at the centre of all that we do
- Celebrate every life as worthy of being explored
- Accept everyone is trying their best
- Work tirelessly and never stop learning
Our Aims:
- To provide as home-like a place as possible, which may be different from what children have experienced so far in life, where children can experience nurturing, safety and a sense of belonging and being cared for.
- To develop ‘re-parenting’ relationships with our children which are nurturing and therapeutic
- To be mindful of how our children communicate, supporting them to understand their inner world, their past and link them to their thoughts and feelings.
- To understand the importance of language and how this impacts our children and our culture.
- To ensure each of our children goes to sleep at night in their own bedroom which is warm, clean, safe and cared for.
- To provide rhythms and routines which promote safety and wellbeing in our children.
- To provide an environment where coercion and physical restraint are unnecessary.
- To ensure the adults looking after our children are positive role models.
- To ensure our children are engaged with education both formal and informal and that achievement becomes a part of everyday life.
- To work in partnership with the wider helping team to ensure their social, emotional and educational needs are met and they are offered aspirations for the future.
- To support the adults who are caring for our children both practically through training and creating a learning environment and emotionally from support and supervision.