Life Story

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Yet for children who don’t grow up in their birth families, many of these memories and their context can be lost. Poet Lemn Sissay wrote: If someone finds it difficult to communicate their life story, other family members and friends may be able to provide key information. You can also try to prompt them by using familiar photos of people or places.

Be something the child can return to when he/she needs to deal with their feelings and clarify and/or help them to accept the past; It is often possible to find out something simple from the person’s past such as where they lived or what they did for a living. Using this as a starting point, you can then reminisce with them using pictures and objects relating to this part of the person’s life. As the process continues more and more memories will be recovered and new ones will emerge. This helps family, friends and care workers to build up a unique picture of the person – and helps them to communicate with you. As the dementia progresses, life story work can play an increasingly important role in helping to stimulate conversation, especially when meeting the person for the first time. Reminiscence

Ensure that we do not feed into a child sense of shame and self blame in relation to their early experiences; Tony Ryan worked as the Adoption Team Manager for Catholic Care, Diocese of Leeds and the Principal Fostering and Adoption Officer for Leeds City Council. He is now retired. Foster families and residential staff should be encouraged to record the story of the child's stay with them as fully as possible. Foster carers must 'encourage the child to reflect on and understand her/his history, according to the child's age, and to keep appropriate memorabilia'. All children in care should have a memory book and foster carers should be encouraged to compile a photograph album and Memory Book recording information and significant events throughout the time the child lives with them. The Memory Book is not the same as the Life Story Book, but some of the information from the Memory Book and some of the photographs should be incorporated into this. The foster carer's Memory Book could include:

Rio, R. (2009) Connecting through music with people with dementia: a guide for caregivers, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Sporting memory projects are great examples of life story and reminiscence work. Two current major initiatives are the Sporting Memories Network and the Football Reminiscence Project.Charlie’s adoptive mum said of his books: “I’ve cried a fair bit reading it. You’ve dealt with the sensitive issues so well, thank you for the time and care you’ve put into researching all the details and describing hard truths in a gentle way. It is so reassuring and helpful to know that we have a tool that can help us with an earlier age as well as the more detailed one for when he can understand things on a deeper level.”

Reminiscence or memory box: these can be particularly useful for people with sensory impairments, such as sight loss or perceptual problems; or for those people in the later stages of dementia, when touch or smell are relied on more to communicate. Unless you have access to someone who knew the person well during their teens and early twenties, you are unlikely to know the songs, the films, the sporting moments and the events that will be well known to them. However, what we do have now is access now to the internet, so this is a great place to start to search for resources and ideas. Life Story Network The small things that are precious and evoke happy memories can play an important role in stimulating the memories of a person with dementia. Keeping the items together in a box – or memory box – will ensure that they are kept safe and can be easily accessed when needed.

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It helps family members develop a closer bond with the person with dementia, through sharing their stories. Learning about people’s life stories can take many different forms. Creating a life story book with sections on childhood, teenage years, working life and family life can be enjoyable for the person with dementia and also for their family. Many imaginative life story programmes exist: some use collages, others use pictures, photographs or objects to evoke positive recall of days gone by. Sometimes these special items are placed in a memory box. All children with a plan for adoption must have a Life Story Book. Making a Life Story Book is more than creating a photograph album with identifying sentences giving dates, places and names. It is an account of a child's life in words, pictures and documents, and provides an opportunity for the child to explore and understand their early history and life before their adoption. It can help people with dementia share their stories and enhance their sense of identity. This is especially useful when they are having difficulty in sharing this information themselves. Past – At this point the social worker’s account of the child’s history is important. Details of the child’s birth: place and time of birth, day of the week, weight, size, origins of name, etc. All of these details should be readily available for children adopted in the UK. For inter country adoptions, such information is unlikely to be available or may be limited. Here, poetic license could be used – all babies are born loveable!