There is a question every child asks eventually, in different words and at different ages, but always with the same urgency underneath it: who am I, and do I matter?
For children who have experienced instability, loss, or neglect before coming into care, this question carries extra weight. The things that help most children build a stable sense of identity, a consistent home, reliable adults, predictable routines, the feeling of being known and chosen, are often exactly what vulnerable children have been missing.
This is the work we do at Tabitha Home that does not make it onto a programme schedule or a report summary. It happens in the margins of the day. It happens when a caregiver notices that a particular child has been quieter than usual and sits with them. It happens during the family meetings we hold every month, where children are given space to ask questions about emotions, relationships, and what it means to live in a care home, and where their questions are taken seriously.
It happened in May, when every person in the home, staff and children alike, wrote down the things they like about themselves and the things they want to work on. Not as a performance exercise, not to produce answers that would please anyone, but as a private act of honest self-reflection. Some children found it difficult. Naming something you genuinely like about yourself, without qualifying it or apologising for it, is harder than it sounds when you have spent years being told, in words or in circumstances, that you are not quite enough.
It happened in June, when the boys and girls moved into separate apartments and had to renegotiate how they shared responsibilities. There could have been resentment. Instead, there was a family meeting where opinions were heard, a mutual agreement was reached, and children walked away with a stronger sense that their voices count and that fairness is something the adults in their lives are actively trying to maintain.
It happens every birthday, when we close down the regular schedule and throw a real party, because we want every child to know that the day they came into the world is worth celebrating.
None of this is dramatic. None of it photographs particularly well. But it accumulates. Over months and years, children who once flinched at the idea of speaking in front of others begin to raise their hands. Children who used to deflect every compliment begin to receive one with a small, genuine smile. Children who arrived with a story they were ashamed of begin to carry it differently, not as a wound but as part of who they are and where they have come from.
That is what we are really doing at Tabitha Home. Not just providing shelter and meals and school fees, though all of those things matter. We are creating the conditions in which children can become themselves.
The most important thing we can give a child is not a qualification or a skill, though we give those too. It is the deep, settled knowledge that they are worth knowing, worth investing in, and worth celebrating.
To walk alongside us in this work, visit www.tabithahome.org.
