Post Adoption Events

Rec & Respite is one of our support groups that meets monthly. Parents have time away from their children to socialize with other adoptive parents, have a safe place to share experiences and concerns, and learn new strategies to assist in the social, emotional, and behavioral development of their families. Children connect with other children in adoptive families over fun planned activities like arts and crafts, games, and movies.

This interactive group is designed for children ages 7-17 who are adopted and their parents.

Children will:

• Meet other children who have been adopted
• Learn to express their feelings about adoption
• Learn strategies to share questions about adoption
• Build confidence in talking about adoption with their family members as well as others
• Play games and have fun!

Parents will:

• Connect with other adoptive parents
• Increase their comfort and confidence in discussing adoption with their child
• Explore ways to enhance their strengths as a parent
• Learn tools to help their children navigate emotions related to adoption.

Many children who no longer live with their biological parent have experienced trauma, such as separation/loss and abuse or neglect. The Caring for Children Who Have Experienced Trauma workshop is an 8-week group for parents on how exposure to trauma can impact a child’s development and how certain tools and strategies can help your child heal. Understanding how trauma affects children can help you make sense of your child’s sometimes baffling behavior, feelings, and attitudes. Once you understand why your child behaves the way he or she does, you’ll feel better prepared to help him or her cope with the effects of trauma. The group is led by clinicians and individuals with real life experience as adoptive parents as well as individuals who were in foster care/adopted.

Caring for Children Who Have Experienced Trauma was developed by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN).

Parenting Through Change (PTC) is a 12-week, group-based intervention for parents of children and adolescents with difficult behaviors and emotions. PTC focuses on the parents and teaches core skills related to skill encouragement, limit setting, monitoring, problem solving, and positive involvement. Each week parents build on previously learned skills that are applied to their particular family and practiced at home throughout the course of treatment. PTC provides specific strategies that are found to be effective in reducing power struggles between parent and child and a better parent-child relationship.