In one month, we go live with “You Understand the Trauma. Now What?,” our free webinar for foster, adoptive, kinship, and stepparents.
We’ll cover what trauma actually does to a child’s development, emotions, and thinking. The behavior you’re seeing is usually not the real problem, and we’ll talk about why.
You’ll walk away with four concrete things you can try that same night.
Register here
One common problem with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day that I don’t see discussed often is what to in complex stepfamilies where different sets of siblings have different biological parents. The usual result is that one set of…
I know from experience that of the biggest challenges in parenting is knowing how to help a child who suffers from depression. The recent CDC report about our teen mental health crisis shows that more and more us are facing that challenge. Young people who…
For the next few blog posts, I want to talk about one of the most important techniques I’ve found for helping children who have suffered trauma, which is using the logical consequences of their behavior. In some cases, we simply need to stand aside and let them learn from the consequences, such as getting a bad grade after waiting until the last minute to complete a project. Other times, we need to actually engineer a glimpse (a safe glimpse) of how the world works. In my next posts, I’ll discuss principles for using logical consequences, but first we need to establish exactly what I’m talking about…
The winter holidays are a good time to think about how we can help individual foster families. This time of year, there is an even greater need for community support. Foster parents have the same holiday to-do lists as every other family. In addition, they have to…
Foster care saved my life. I know "saved my life" is really a simple, laymen term that kind-of covers it; however, it also may be a little too simplistic for the real depth of what that means for me. Before foster care my perception of…
A gathering of Christian adoptive, kinship, and foster parents reminded me of some important lessons for raising other people’s children.