Permanency Tip of the Week: Absence of permanency ~ Experience of reciprocity in relationships
For our Youth in foster care, who have experienced an absence of Permanency in their life along with trauma, abuse and / or neglect, one of the challenges that they may struggle with when presented with is that may not be familiar with the reciprocity that serves as the foundation for healthy relationships. Many of their relationships have been either one-sided, often to their detriment, or have been largely conditional in nature. As we guide them through the Permanency process, we should focus on supporting them through the experience of reciprocity in relationships.
Permanency Story of the Week: Judge unwraps best Christmas gift of all as he handles group holiday adoption
Judge David Gooding has handled foster care, delinquents and adoption cases for 11 years in the court system, estimating that he’s done 2,500 adoptions. He came up with the bigger event in 2005 to get more children adopted by Christmas. “A 5-year-old only has one opportunity to experience Christmas as a 5-year-old,” Gooding said. “I do it for them, I do it for me. … The foster and adoptive families are amazing people who open their hearts and homes to children just at the time they need them.”
Staff from Family Support Services of North Florida, which handles foster care and adoption programs, joined guardian ad litem volunteers who protect children’s rights in legal cases in the packed courtroom. Among the other visitors was state Department of Children and Families Secretary Mike Carroll. “For these kids, they found their forever family. That is wonderful,” Carroll said. “I am an adoptive parent myself, so they will find out that the gift they receive today will keep giving for the rest of their lives.”
After each adoptive parent went through the ceremony, they received Christmas gifts and a visit with Santa.
Current Permanency related articles:
North Carolina Permanency Efforts You Should Know About – Family and Children’s Resource Program
If you’re a foster parent or child welfare social worker in North Carolina, you’re already committed to ensuring that every child has a safe, loving, permanent family. You have shown that permanence is something close to your heart. For this reason, we know you’ll be excited to learn about two strategies (Family Finding and Permanency Innovation Initiative) our state is using right now, through a partnership between Children’s Home Society of North Carolina and the North Carolina Division of Social Services, to ensure every child has a forever family.
“Permanency” is the same no matter who you are. We all want to feel permanently connected to people who love us and who know us. We all want to feel safe and secure and special within those relationships. Foster parents can help children feel a sense of permanency by ensuring they know they are always welcome and should feel “at home” with their foster families.
Counties Convene to Prevent Pregnancy among California’s Foster Youth
On December 8th and 9th six California counties (Los Angeles, Orange, Santa Clara, Butte, San Luis Obispo and Napa) came together for the first two-day session of the California Foster Youth Pregnancy Prevention Institute, organized by the John Burton Foundation, the American Public Human Services Association and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The purpose of the Institute is to reduce pregnancy among youth in foster care by incorporating evidence-based strategies into local child welfare practice and developing local reproductive health policies.
The year-long effort is funded in part by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, which also supported a major study by Dr. Emily Putman Hornstein that examined rates of pregnancy among youth in foster care. The study included a wide range of findings, among those the fact that 1 in 3 young women in foster care at age 18 will give birth by age 21. Dr. Mark Courtney’s recent report on 17 year-olds also raised concerns about the level of pregnancy prevention available to foster youth, finding a full 26% of 17 year-old girls in foster care have been pregnant at least once.
Comforting Grieving Children and Youth by Darla Henry, Ph.D.,
Feature Article in the November/December 2014 Issue of Fostering Families Today addresses how children and youth in the child welfare system want a life free of pain and full of love. If possible, most want to live with their parents. We in the system cannot discount or minimize the power of love between children and their birth parents. While parents may have had inadequate parenting capacity, most have loved their children and have conveyed this love to their children in some way. Acknowledging these basic facts-and the resulting grief children experience at the loss of their parents-is the basis for helping children prepare for permanency.
Please visit Darla Henry’s 3-5-7 model website for more information.
New Tools Available for Working with Children Impacted by Trauma
San Francisco-based nonprofit A Home Within has developed a comprehensive training on the impact of trauma on children and a set of strategies to help practitioners build strong, healthy relationships with children who have experienced trauma. The training series is called Fostering Relationships and includes training and tools for four age ranges: infants, young children, school age youth and teens and young adults.
The Potential Trauma of Family Tree Projects
Many adopted persons particularly in closed adoptions, cringe at the thought of creating a family tree that most students will have assigned to them in high school or college. The fear and discomfort from adoptees creating a family tree stems from not having access to their original birth certificate and not knowing their biological family history. Feelings of grief, abandonment, and loss are a few emotions that an adoptee can experience while trying to complete a family tree project.
Advocates for Families First: Enhancing Support and Advocacy for Children in Kinship, Foster, Adoptive Families
Advocates for Families First: Enhancing Support and Advocacy for Children in Kinship, Foster, Adoptive Families is a collaboration of the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), the National Foster Parent Association (NFPA), and Generations United.
How childhood trauma could be mistaken for ADHD
Dr. Nicole Brown’s was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress prevailed. Their parents found them hard to manage and teachers described them as disruptive or inattentive. Brown knew these behaviors as classic symptoms of ADHD, a brain disorder characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and an inability to focus.
“Despite our best efforts in referring them to behavioral therapy and starting them on stimulants, it was hard to get the symptoms under control,” she said of treating her patients according to guidelines for ADHD. “I began hypothesizing that perhaps a lot of what we were seeing was more externalizing behavior as a result of family dysfunction or other traumatic experience.”