Why Life Story Work Matters for Children in Care

Most of us have never really had to think about how we know our own history. A parent mentions you hated peas until you were seven. A sibling still brings up the time you got lost at a theme park. There's a box in the loft somewhere containing faded photos of family holidays. All of this stuff just built up over years, the way things do, until you have a whole picture of "you" that other people have been quietly holding onto.

For children growing up in care, that picture is often a lot thinner. They often move house multiple times, meaning things go missing and memories may not be recorded. The carer who knew which toy they needed to fall asleep, or a joke that made them laugh, might not be around to tell them about it as they get older. That's roughly the space life story work is meant to fill.

Life story work is the process of helping a child in care understand their own history: who they are, where they came from, and what's happened to them.

What life story work actually involves

Life story work is usually pulled together over time, often as a book or folder, with input from social workers, carers and sometimes the child. It's not a one-off thing either. Official guidance says it should start as soon as a child becomes looked after, and keep building over time rather than being done in one sitting.

A lot of it tends to focus on the official side of things: why a child came into care, key dates, family structure, the order placements happened in. But the detail around memories, achievements, likes and dislikes goes missing, because nobody writes it in a case file.

The small stuff isn't really small

For many children, not having these details can leave a different kind of gap. Less "I don't know my history" and more a sense that nobody was paying close enough attention to remember any of it. For adults who grew up in care, it can feel like a piece of their identity is missing.

The role of foster carers

Guidance for carers is fairly specific about life story work — things like what a child was like when they arrived, what they liked and disliked, milestones like learning to ride a bike, and family days out and celebrations. Even small mementos count, like a first lost tooth or a lock of hair.

Having the time to keep track of these things is genuinely difficult, because foster carers already have so much on their plate. This kind of everyday record-keeping often just doesn't happen consistently. Not for lack of caring about it, but because nothing's really been built to make it manageable alongside everything else.

That gap is what My Life Story was built to close.

Simply download My Life Story to a secure device, and you and the child in your care can fill bits in when you have a moment. It's safe, secure and can easily be passed on to whoever looks after the child next.

My Life Story is meant to be easy to fill out. Rather than another process to learn, it's a place to jot down the kind of detail that would otherwise disappear: favourite things, funny moments, milestones, the in-jokes and little routines that make up daily life. A few minutes here and there, whenever something feels worth keeping. There is space for you to fill it out, and space for the child to as well.

Older children are encouraged to write in it themselves, in their own words, with your support when it comes to things like setting up passwords and security questions, so they're not locked out of their own memories later on.

To be clear, this isn't trying to replace any formal record keeping. This memory book is for the softer stuff, the memories that formal records were never really designed to hold.

How it works

• It stays on your device: nothing is stored online. No accounts, no servers, no one else can see it. Foster carers can help the children in their care to set up a password and make sure it is saved in a secure location.
• The foster carer and the child in care control what goes in: there's space for both the foster carer and the child to add their memories. Children are encouraged to write their own entries, in their own words.
• It moves with the child or young person: if they move house, their memory book goes with them.

Designed to work for everyone

• Clear, dyslexia-friendly fonts
• Light and dark mode
• Space for photos and voice recordings (writing isn't the only way to capture something!)

Worth the five minutes

None of this changes the bigger reasons children in care often have gaps in their history. Placements will still change, time will still be tight. But a short entry, written while something's still fresh, can be the difference between a memory surviving or just fading out.

Maybe years from now, someone opens their version of My Life Story and finds out they once loved a particular song, or were proud of learning to ride a bike, or made everyone laugh at dinner one night. Not huge things. But for someone trying to piece together their own story, that's often exactly what they're looking for.

If this resonates, My Life Story is the memory book we built with all this in mind. Download it today and add to it whenever you've got five minutes and something worth writing down. One day, the child you look after could be really thankful that you took the time.

Frequently asked questions