So often we do focus, and understandably so on the needs of the traumatized children. These children may come to us domestically through the child welfare system or from institutional care in other countries. What has been missing in the training room and also in practice is a look at what happens to adoptive parents who pour all their energies into parenting traumatized and victimized children. They are often blamed and left without support or understanding. What does life feel like to them? How do they survive personally and as a family? What happens when nothing works? What as professionals can we do?
Professionals who deal each day with the trauma of their clients, for the most part, can leave it behind at the end of the day. For adoptive parents life changes for them forever. They live with it every day. This workshop will examine the following:
Ask It Right: Enhancing and Building Interviewing Skills for Foster and Adoptive Homestudies
TWO DAYS (Can be adapted for one)
Developing interview skills that enhance the mutual assessment process for foster and adoptive parents is key to successful matching of children and families. In this fun and very interactive hands-on workshop participants will identify common interviewing problems and identify strategies to deal with those common problems. They will develop a common protocol for the interviewing process; will identify the key components of behavioral interviewing, learn how to assess families for the placement of sexually abused children and much, much more!!!
Day One: Assessing Foster and Adoptive Parents Potential for Success: Using the Casey Family Assessment Suite of Tools
Participants will spend most of day one of the workshop learning how to use the just released Casey Family Programs Assessment Suite of Tools. This is an online experience and will require online access for all workers.
Day Two: Interviewing
On the second day of the workshop, participants will work with new interviewing techniques, including behavioral interviewing, key components of assessment for families for the placement of sexually abused children and how to incorporate pre-service training into the interviewing protocol. Participants will leave the workshop with many new tools and new insight.
