Anyone who spends enough time looking at the effects of trauma on child development easily could conclude that our children are doomed. Current research in child welfare connects trauma to everything from obesity to significant increases in anxiety and depression. Fortunately, there is a growing…
I ran across an interesting review of mental health studies concluding that stories are an excellent way to build resilience in children. I’m a firm believer in the power of stories, and I love research that supports my ideas. This particular review reminds us that storytelling is…
An interesting working paper published recently argues that children suffer far more ill effects from their parents’ divorce than we previously thought. Working papers are not final and not yet peer-reviewed, but are published for discussion and comment. Thus, it’s too early to fully rely…
As we head to the start of summer, many of us are trying to plan a family vacation with foster, adoptive or blended families. Mixing all of the differing ages, expectations, and family relationships can be very challenging. My husband and I love to travel,…
One of the difficulties in fashioning strong child protection policies is that there is little evidence about what actually works. Often, all we can do is reason backward from incidents, hoping that closing a loophole that a particular abuser exploited will prevent abuse in the…
In working with kids who have suffered trauma, there are several important principles we need to keep in mind. One critical point we need to understand is that childhood trauma does cause major problems, but it doesn’t have to…
A recent lawsuit offers some important lessons in child protection policies for youth-serving organizations (YSOs). A school resource officer (SRO) has filed suit in Savannah, Georgia, alleging that his supervisors retaliated against him for reporting allegations by two high school students that another SRO had sexually abused…
Parenting kids who have gone through hard times requires that we understand childhood trauma. After years of not understanding the topic, suddenly everyone who works with children seems to be talking about being “trauma-informed.” To help our kids move forward, we must understand what trauma is as well as what it is not…
It’s that time of year again, when we Plan B parents have to deal with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. For stepparents and foster parents, the days may not be times to celebrate, but days that we feel forgotten or overlooked. All the attention goes to biological parents, and foster parents or stepparents are left on their own. Fortunately, there are some helpful ways we can prepare ourselves to avoid disappointment and enjoy the days in our own way…
Having a claim that a child has been injured in your program is every youth organization’s worst nightmare. Fortunately, you can start developing steps in your child protection policy that will help you be better prepared to deal with such a claim. By planning ahead,…
A gathering of Christian adoptive, kinship, and foster parents reminded me of some important lessons for raising other people’s children.
In this series about logical consequences, we’ve discussed principles for letting kids suffer the logical consequences of messes that they get themselves into. Sometimes we need to actually engineer a solution. For example, we can’t safely let a child learn the consequences of running into a busy street. But we often can engineer safe glimpses of what happens when they ignore a rule. Here are three key steps to engineering glimpses of real life for our kids…