A television producer is gathering first-hand accounts from the birth children of foster carers - the sons and daughters who grew up alongside the children their parents took in.
If your parents fostered while you were growing up, you already know that almost everything written about foster care is written about the children who arrived - and almost nothing is written about the children who were already there.
I should say who I am. My name is Alexandra Cook. I grew up in a fostering family myself - my parents started when I was about four and went on fostering for more than twenty-five years - and I'm now a television producer in the early research stages of a possible documentary. This survey is how I'm trying to work out whether what I lived through was unusual, common, or somewhere in between.
I'm interested in your side of it. The whole of it. The placements that worked and the ones that didn't. The arrivals, the leavings, the rules that suddenly applied to you and not to them, or to them and not to you. The children who became siblings, the children who became cautionary tales, and what all of it looks like now you're looking back as an adult.
Nothing you share here will be broadcast or attributed to you without your explicit, separate consent. This is purely research - I'm trying to understand the shape of the experience before going any further.
If you'd rather speak than write, there's a box at the end where you can ask me to get in touch.
The first studies of birth children in fostering families appeared in the late 1960s. Sixty years on, this remains a relatively under-researched area - the experience of birth children has tended to sit quietly in the background of a sector understandably focused on the children in its care.
All fields marked with a star are required. Everything else is optional - answer what you like, skip what you don't. You can stop at any point.
Your response has been received. I read every one of these personally - if you've asked for a follow-up, I'll be in touch within a fortnight.