Dr. Greg Manning

A Professional Trainer, Keynote Speaker and Consultant

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Permanency in the News – Week of 12/18/17

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Greetings Permanency Champions,

This will be the Final Permanency in the News for 2017 – Next one will be the Week of 1/1/18.

Permanency Tip of the Week:  Trying to be a ‘Normal’ Teenager, AND Find Permanency

Think back to what it was like for you in going through all the trials and tribulations of adolescence.  Nothing made sense, there did not seem to be any roadmap and everyone else seemed to have it all together in their life.  Now imagine layering on top of that all the challenges that our Youth in out of home care face – constant change plus a history of abuse, loss and trauma.  It is critical that we provide our Youth with a balance of compassion and realistic consequences in response to their decisions.  When we establish and maintain this balance, we help to begin to bring a sense of normalcy to our Youth’s life.  With this normalcy, comes the potential to be open to healthy relationships and eventually Permanency in their life.

Permanency Success Story of the Week: 17 Kids Get Forever Families in Franklin County on National Adoption Day

ABC 6 – Columbus, Ohio – Seventeen children will be tucked into beds at their “forever homes” after an adoption ceremony at the Franklin County Courthouse.  November is National Adoption Month and Thursday’s 18th annual event is raising awareness of more than 110,000 children in foster care nationwide needing permanent, loving families…Rita Soronon, President and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption said too many Americans still think that children are in care because they did something wrong. “Nothing could be further from the truth. These are children who are there through no fault of their own,” said Soronon…Mary Daniels already had 3 kids but said when she found out 4 children of family friends were needing foster care, she stepped up when the biological parents could not. “They need to feel they belong. They want that connection,” said Bailey.

Asked what she would tell other people considering adoption, Daniels said.  “Open your heart, it’s not alway easy but if you just open your heart and have open minds everything will fall together, you just got to believe in God.”

Permanency Related Articles:

Everyone Provides Kinship Care – Adrian McLemore

TEDx-Dayton – Adrian has the unique perspective of growing up in the foster care system and later providing kinship care to his niece and nephew. He shares his experiences with both systems and explains why he believes kinship care is the better option. Adrian McLemore works for the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland. Before moving to Baltimore in 2016, he spent his career working in the public and non-profit sectors in Dayton. Adrian’s true passion is serving children and families. Having emancipated from foster care at the age of 18, Adrian has dedicated his life to serving others. He is the co-founder of numerous organizations, initiatives and programs dedicated to improving the lives of children and families across Ohio and throughout the country. Adrian attended Wright State University and holds a degree in political science.

 

Making the Case for Adoption Clinical Competence

Allison Davis Maxon – Families built through adoption, foster care and kinship care have unique needs and challenges throughout each developmental phase of their family’s life cycle. Unfortunately, the complexities of adopting a child with a history of neglect, trauma and/or multiple attachment disruptions can quickly overwhelm even the healthiest of family systems. Without specialized, adoption/permanency competent mental health supportive services too many children and youth will disrupt from their newly formed families.

For youth in foster care ages 12-17, the disruption rate is 25%. Each subsequent move furthers the child’s belief that they are unlovable and deepens the well of pain they carry into their next ‘placement’ or family. It is not enough to simply find families for the child welfare systems waiting children, it is imperative that clinicians have specialized training to become adoption/permanency competent. For the courageous parents who are willing to open their hearts and homes to our community’s most impacted children and youth, they both need and deserve the specialized mental health services that will assist them in successfully parenting a child with complex and/or relational trauma…

 

Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems

Springer Books – This comprehensive reference offers a robust framework for introducing and sustaining trauma-responsive services and culture in child welfare systems. Organized around concepts of safety, permanency, and well-being, chapters describe innovations in child protection, violence prevention, foster care, and adoption services to reduce immediate effects of trauma on children and improve long-term development and maturation. Foundations and interventions for practice include collaborations with families and community entities, cultural competency, trauma-responsive assessment and treatment, promoting trauma-informed parenting, and, when appropriate, working toward reunification of families. The book’s chapters on agency culture also address staffing, supervisory, and training issues, planning and implementation, and developing a competent, committed, and sturdy workforce.

 

Fight Burnout and Compassion Fatigue with Lots of Self-care Ideas

Juvenile Justice Information Exchange – For years I have sought out with fierce determination conversations, books and articles such as this…We already know how to find strategies, so that isn’t the real question. The real question is: What gets in the way of feeling authentically well for you? Consider for a moment that what you really want is to learn about something we can do that we actually feel like doing.

Feel good self-care: Let’s say there are two self-care categories. The first category is the kind that gives you immediate gratification and nourishes your soul, like laughing with a friend who just gets it, getting a massage, taking in a deep breath, organizing your desk, drinking more water, snuggling with your puppy, etc…Smart self-care: The second category we’ll call smart self-care, which I have affectionately nicknamed the sucky self-care. A solid truth I’ve come to understand is that smart self-care is not something we feel like doing, but it’s the kind of self-care we are starving for. Smart self-care is about cultivating strategies to address things like healthy boundaries, vulnerability, toxic relationships, reactiveness, numbing, scarcity, failure, success, etc. All things we tend to avoid if possible (yes, some of us avoid success)…

My dad always says, “Feelings are real, not reality.” Smart self-care is something we really don’t feel like doing all the time, but at the end of the day it brings us closer to living wholeheartedly. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … Go!

 

The Policy Labs We Urgently Need

Governing – Following a bipartisan call to “improve the evidence available for making decisions about government programs and policies,” Congress is poised to pass legislation to establish secure infrastructure to accelerate statistical uses of federal administrative data while also ensuring stringent privacy protections for that data. But some states are already out ahead, establishing offices known as data labs or policy labs to enable them to partner with academia and make use of their administrative data to evaluate and improve programs and policies. In Chicago, for example, the Center for State Child Welfare Data helps multiple state governments create secure, longitudinal databases to make better use of their own data to help children.  Information Gateway resource: Evidence-Based Practice.

 

Sincerely,

Dr. Greg Manning