Permanency Tip of the Week: Permanency as a Source of Freedom from Fear
As we celebrated Freedom and Independence on the 4th of July, we could consider the achievement of Permanency as yielding a sense of Freedom and Independence from fear for our Youth. Some fears that might be alleviated through Permanency include: Can I be loved? Will I ever have a family? Will I ever be a part of a family? Where will I live tomorrow? For children who have always experienced Permanency, these fears rarely ever surface; however for our youth in out of home care, these fears may permeate their consciousness on a nearly constant basis. Imagine how exhausting and distracting this would be! Let’s go out there and secure Freedom and Independence from fear for our Youth!
Permanency Story of the Week: The Parent Trip: Karen Owens and Adam Owens of Wyomissing
Read a touching story featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a family who adopted several children with disabilities after the death of their son. The family was recently honored with a 2014 Adoption Excellence Award, and their story is the first listed on the list of recipients on the Children’s Bureau Website.
Current Permanency related articles:
Identifying extended family for children in foster care
For children in foster care, connections to extended family are important in facilitating permanent placement. But identifying extended family can be difficult. This report reviews the results of recent evaluations of Family Finding, a model that helps practitioners identify and engage family members of a child in foster care. Findings are mixed and inconclusive across evaluations, leading the authors to examine differences in implementation and offer recommendations that might improve program effectiveness.
Change a Child’s Life Video Series
Children’s Action Network – Good Day LA and FOX 11 have teamed up with Children’s Action Network to bring you the stories of foster children waiting for adoptive homes. These films, part of a series called “Change a Child’s Life” feature foster children telling their stories in their own words. There are more than 107,000 foster children in the United States who need a place to call home. It is our hope that by raising awareness about the youth and sharing their hopes and dreams, we can help them find permanent loving families.
Foster Care and Child Sex Trafficking
Dr. John DeGarmo – Did you know that of those children rescued from Child Sex Trafficking, 60% were children from foster care? As a foster parent, and a parent in general, these facts shock and disturb me. Yet, our general society fails to understand or care about this danger. This week, I wanted to share with you several articles on Child Sex Trafficking. With knowledge and information, we can all come together to help protect our children from these dangers. 1) Super Bowl And Human Trafficking: What You Need To Know; 2) Lured Off the Streets, a Look at How Young Women Become Sex Trafficking Victims; 3) How to Protect our Children from Online Dangers and Human Trafficking; 4) Finally, here is my weekly Foster Care 101 video that focuses on this issue.
Self Efficacy in Child Welfare Work
Child abuse and neglect in the United States resulted in 676,569 reports in 2011 (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2012). Workers in this field struggle with low pay, high caseloads, inadequate training and supervision, and risk of violence, all of which contribute to worker burnout and poor worker retention rates. Worker self-efficacy is predictive of worker retention, job performance, and persistence in this difficult field. This paper reports the development of a new measure of self-efficacy from a sample of 395 child welfare workers. Factor analysis revealed two domains of self-efficacy, direct practice and indirect practice, which can be modestly predicted by worker characteristics upon hire and the training program the workers attend. Worker self-efficacy can be used to identify vulnerable workers who may be especially in need of strong supervisory support as well as understand who to target for recruitment.
Resilience in foster youth: A decision?
The Chronicle of Social Change – James, a former foster youth who holds a master’s degree in social work, parallels his life with that of a half-brother who was in and out of jail, on drugs and involved in gang-related activities. “It just makes me think,” said James, “we came from the same environment, but what was the transformative change that catapulted us to go on different trajectories?” Unlike his half-brother, James chose to stay in foster care. He felt that this sometimes horrific route was better than an even worse home environment. Resiliency, to James, was a conscious decision.
Being neglected harms brain development in kids
TIME Magazine – Childhood neglect leads to harmful changes in the brain, a new study says. In new research published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, researchers looked at brain differences between Romanian children who were either abandoned or institutionalized, sent to institutions and then to foster families, or were raised in biological families. Kids who were not raised in a family setting had noticeable alterations in the white matter of their brains later on, while the white matter in the brains of the children who were placed with a foster family looked pretty similar to the brains of the children who were raised with their biological families.
Orphan Trains: Exhibit, play bring to life a little known aspect of our history
Between 1854 and 1929, more than a quarter of a million children between the ages of 4 and 18, some even younger, were transported to their new homes on trains nicknamed “orphan trains” or “baby trains.” The relocation program ended when organized programs for foster care began. An exhibit at Varsity Center for the Arts in Carbondale is bringing their stories to life, in conjunction with a Stage Company production of ‘Healin’ Home,” a play by Kari Cattan that focuses on three of those children looking for a new home after running away from the train on which they were traveling.