Being culturally competent in practice is an essential skill for any practitioner working with people. Award-winning social worker and diversity trainer Vivian Okeze-Tirado has developed an applied practice model to help you to increase your understanding of diversity and improve your cultural competency: D - Decide to be a Culturally Sensitive Practitioner I - Invite people to talk about their cultures, values, beliefs, and experiences V- Value their history, individuality(,) and differences E- Explore the client's realities, show curiosity R- Reflect upon information and knowledge received S- Scrutinise yourself I -Identify strategies to aid your work T- Train yourself to treat people, children, and families individually Y- Yield to culturally sensitive practice Encouraging you to do more than just talk about racism, this simple practice tool provides easily achievable steps and practical guidance to empower you and your colleagues tackle racism and discrimination in practice.

Life Story Therapy is an approach designed to enable children to explore, question and understand the past events of their lives. It aims to secure their future through strengthening attachment with their carers and providing the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of self and a feeling of wellbeing. This comprehensive overview lays out the theory underlying life story therapy, including an accessible explanation of contemporary research in neurobiology and trauma. Featuring tried and tested ideas, with tools and templates illustrated through instructive case studies, the author identifies how life story therapy can be implemented in practice. Finally, the relationships between life story therapy and traditional 'talking' therapies are explored. Life Story Therapy with Traumatized Children is essential reading for those working with children and adolescents, including social workers, teachers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term carers, psychologists and other professionals.

The prospect of adopting a child can be both exciting and overwhelming. There are many different types of adoption and choices to be made in pursuing an adoption. Your options for adoption will depend on the needs and interests of an adoptable child or youth as well as what is important to your family. These factors may include your flexibility around the characteristics of the child you wish to adopt, your feelings about contact with birth family members, your resources, and how long you are willing to wait for your child. This book discusses the options available for different types of families and provides guidance for adopting a child.

Government-by-proxy and intergovernmental relations profoundly affect the public administration of foster care. Using examples from foster care systems in the states of Delaware, Michigan, New York, and Rhode Island, Rebecca Padot eloquently combines a rigorous methodology and theory work to expose the conditions under which foster care outcomes can be improved. The cases selected suggest that the federal government has increased its focus on measuring the performance of state programs while simultaneously decreasing its funding of state foster care programs and offering the states very little management or mentorship. Padot turns the page and recommends administrators place a greater priority on building community partners, integrating the advice of mentors, providing leadership from public managers, and cultivating relationships with the federal government. An original and timely resource for scholars and practitioners, this book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of how leadership and management variables may be associated with more positive foster care practices and performance in the United States.

Written by experienced clinicians, this book provides an exploration of how educators can easily use Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP) to help vulnerable pupils to thrive. DDP is an intervention model for children and young people who have experienced trauma in past relationships. Safety and security is increased through offering emotional connection in a variety of ways, helped by the attitude of PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy). The model gives children the opportunity to experience the relationships necessary for healthy development, emotional regulation and resilience. This book gives educators all the tools they need to embed DDP into their practice, including building connections with students, partnerships with parents, understanding the theory behind DDP, and overcoming the challenges of implementing it in practice. These principles can be adapted to support pupils at all levels.

Can I Let You Go? is the true story of Faye, a wonderful young woman who may never be able to parent her unborn child. Faye is 24, pregnant, and has learning difficulties as a result of her mother's alcoholism. Faye is gentle, childlike and vulnerable, and normally lives with her grandparents, both of whom have mobility problems. Cathy and her children welcome Faye into their home and hearts. The care plan is for Faye to stay with Cathy until after the birth when she will return home and the baby will go for adoption. Given that Faye never goes out alone it is something of a mystery how she ever became pregnant and Faye says it's a secret. To begin with Faye won't acknowledge she is pregnant or talk about the changes in her body as she worries it will upset her grandparents, but after her social worker assures her she can talk to Cathy she opens up. However, this leads to Faye realizing just how much she will lose and she changes her mind and says she wants to keep her baby. Is it possible Faye could learn enough to parent her child? Cathy believes it is, and Faye's social worker is obliged to give Faye the chance.

A heartbreaking true story of a broken family and the foster carer who wants to keep them together... The Watsons are no strangers to sibling placements but when Casey takes the call from her supervising social worker one frosty January morning, she can instantly tell from the tone of her colleague's voice that there's a complicated case ahead. And she's right. A four-day-old baby boy called Tommy - born in prison - plus his four-year-old half-brother, the lively Seth. A month later, the very moment she gets out of prison, the boys' mother - a 19-year-old called Jenna - also follows. For Casey, it would it be a difficult scenario on several levels. Caring for a new born in her fifties with a pre-schooler who has spent most of his young life without boundaries tearing around her ankles, while also looking out for his drug-addicted mum who is ill-equipped to parent. It's an unusual situation but one that has arisen in a bid to keep the family together. Can Casey find the energy and strength needed to rise to the challenge? Casey believes she can but when baby Tommy and Seth arrive, she falters. Seth is not so much a pocket rocket as a seek and destroy missile with a whole other agenda...

Representing an often overlooked population in social work literature, this book explores the experiences of LGBTQ youth as they navigate the child welfare system. Adam McCormick examines the entirety of a youth's experience, from referral into care and challenges to obtaining permanency to aging out or leaving care. Included throughout the book are stories from LGBTQ youth that address personal issues such as abuse, bullying and harassment, and double standards. Filled with resources to foster resilience and empower youth, this book is ideal for professionals who are hoping to create a more inclusive and affirming system of care for LGBTQ youth.

Children who have experienced trauma, loss or separation early in life need more than just special care and attention; they need to be parented with love and security in a way that allows them to heal and rebuild emotional bonds. This comprehensive book provides parents and carers with crucial advice and guidance on how to strengthen attachment and trust. Based on Dan Hughes' proven 'PACE' model of therapeutic parenting, this book explains how to implement PACE techniques to overcome the challenges faced by children who struggle to connect emotionally. Barriers to stable relationships such as a lack of trust, fear of emotional intimacy, and high levels of shame are all explained. It explores techniques to overcome these barriers by teaching how to support the child's behaviour at the same time as building empathy and trust. The practical parenting guidance offered throughout is essential for carers or parents of troubled children, and will help build safe, secure emotional relationships.

Therapeutic parenting is not your usual parenting style. It's a special, specific way to raise kids who have experienced trauma in their past, and requires a lot of commitment and determination - this is about far more than love and care. But where do you start? This book is the ideal first step for anyone who wants to understand how therapeutic parenting works. It offers simple summaries of the key ideas behind it, fully illustrated throughout with informative cartoons and graphics. Over 40 different issues are covered, from dysregulation and fear, to setting boundaries and parenting in the midst of trauma. The perfect introduction for new therapeutic parents, family members, teachers or other adults who need to help support you and your child, this Quick Guide will also be a source of inspiration for more experienced parents.

How can we help heal children who have been abused or neglected? Healing Child Trauma Through Restorative Parenting details how children can be helped to recover with the use of Restorative Parenting, an innovative model informed by psychological and neurological understanding of trauma and its effects. It explains the critical role that people, relationships and the environment play in a child's recovery. It shows what constitutes a therapeutic environment, whereby a child experiences therapy not as one-to-one sessions but as a lived experience. The authors show how other components of the model - building therapeutic relationships, promoting positive education and encouraging clinically informed life style choices - are intimately linked, each critical to the re-parenting which the child undergoes. This book will be welcomed by professionals working with children, including those in residential, health and foster care, psychology, education and health, as well as those commissioning services. The models, concepts and practices are transferable to public, private and charitable agencies.

Using Stories to Build Bridges with Traumatized Children is full of creative ideas for how you can use stories therapeutically with children in counselling, life story work or direct work. Psychologist Kim S. Golding shows how you can use stories to build connections with children aged 4-16 and support their recovery from trauma and stress. She illustrates the techniques with 21 stories adapted from her own clinical work with children and families, and explains how you can expand or adapt them to make them more relevant for a particular child. Advice and stories are arranged into sections dealing with common psychological issues, including looking back and moving on, lack of trust and need for attention. Golding also gives invaluable tips for planning stories and life story work, and for storymaking with children. She also describes how stories can be used therapeutically with parents of traumatized children and as a tool for self-reflection by counsellors. Imaginative and practical, this book will be enormously useful for counsellors, psychologists, therapists and social workers working with traumatized children, and will also be helpful for parents and carers involved in therapeutic parenting.

This is the go-to guide for practitioners, parents and carers who want to expand their understanding and skills for therapeutic parenting - a deeply nurturing parenting style particularly effective for children who have experienced trauma or adversity. It provides an easy to understand explanation of the latest theory and research in trauma and neuroscience, and explains how these relate to everyday parenting strategies. It provides clarity on complex areas, such as early developmental trauma in children, and insights into key challenges, including managing transitions, sibling relationships, challenging behaviour, the teenage years, and how to find time and space for self-care. With experience, professional expertise, and text features to aid learning throughout, this book is the one-stop shop for everyone wanting to truly understand every aspect of therapeutic parenting and trauma.

* How does complex trauma differ from trauma? * What is dissociation? * How does it affect children? * How can you help? These questions and more are answered in this guide to understanding the nature of complex trauma and dissociation, making these seemingly complicated topics accessible to all. Complex trauma and dissociation is a subject around which there is much confusion and misunderstanding. This can lead to children lacking the support they really need, and even misdiagnosis of the problems they are really struggling with. Written as a complement to The Simple Guide to Child Trauma, this book aims to inform, clarify and deepen the understanding of complex trauma and resulting dissociation. It also provides practical advice for those caring for or working with these children.

How do you create an adoption portfolio that will show prospective birth families why you are the perfect adoptive parent for their child? Do you know which pictures to include and which to leave out? Do you really understand what prospective birth parents care about? This is a step-by-step guide to creating a portfolio which will reflect your personality, make a strong positive impact and encourage the right birth family to choose you. Madeleine Melcher shares the secrets she has discovered over years of creating successful portfolios, profiles and prospective birth parent letters. She combines simple and effective design ideas and tips for writing and layout with a deep understanding of how portfolios work. Importantly, this book also draws extensively on the experiences of birth mothers and the professionals who support them to examine what they are really looking for, featuring questions which prospective birth mothers will want to see answered in your portfolio. From text to design, this guide will give you the confidence to create a portfolio that sets you apart. It is essential reading for prospective adoptive parents, as well as adoption attorneys and adoption agencies advising those hoping to adopt.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author comes a harrowing and moving memoir about two innocent and frightened unfosterable children who do not know what it means to be loved.

This is the third book in the series.

The shock that strikes Casey and her family when Ashton and Olivia arrive is immeasurable. Two dirty, frightened little waifs stand before them, huge eyes staring around their new surroundings. Ashton 9, Olivia 6, have the same urchin look; hair running wild with head lice, filthy nails and skin covered in scabs. And the smell is horrific. The eldest two children of a group of five siblings, Casey had only been told they were coming two days earlier. But it was an emergency, temporary placement, and they were only due to stay a couple of weeks

Casey is desperate to help these poor, lost children, who have been taken away from their family because they were considered at risk, but before she can even start to understand the horrific things that have happened in the past, she has to teach them the most basic of behaviours. Ashton and Olivia have no barriers and no sense of what s right and wrong her challenges begin with the toilet and eating habits.

The weeks roll into months and the months roll on, but bit by bit the children are starting to feel like they truly belong to a family, for the first time. With this new found security and love, gradually they start to reveal what really happened to them and their siblings at home, and slowly Casey can help them start to rebuild their young lives."

In 1991, unable to have a second child because of a medical problem and struggling to cope in a failing marriage, New Zealander Adele Rickerby decided to take her future in her hands by adopting a child from Romania. The misguided policies of the recently deposed Ceasescu government on family planning had led to the birth of an estimated 100,000 unwanted babies in that country. The Promise I Kept is Adele's story of her nightmare journey halfway round the world to find and adopt a baby, to negotiate her way through the barriers created by red tape and corrupt officialdom and finally to carry her tiny new daughter safely home to a life where she could be properly loved and cared for.

Government-by-proxy and intergovernmental relations profoundly affect the public administration of foster care. Using examples from foster care systems in the states of Delaware, Michigan, New York, and Rhode Island, Rebecca Padot eloquently combines a rigorous methodology and theory work to expose the conditions under which foster care outcomes can be improved. The cases selected suggest that the federal government has increased its focus on measuring the performance of state programs while simultaneously decreasing its funding of state foster care programs and offering the states very little management or mentorship. Padot turns the page and recommends administrators place a greater priority on building community partners, integrating the advice of mentors, providing leadership from public managers, and cultivating relationships with the federal government.

An original and timely resource for scholars and practitioners, this book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of how leadership and management variables may be associated with more positive foster care practices and performance in the United States.

The second book from Sunday Times bestselling author Casey Watson.

Two weeks after saying farewell to her first foster child, Casey is asked to look after Sophia, a troubled 12-year-old with a sad past. Sophia s actions are disturbing and provocative and, before long, Casey and her family find themselves in a dark and dangerous situation.

Two years ago Sophia s mother had a terrible accident. Sophia has been in care ever since.

Right away, Casey feels something isn t right. Sophia s a well-developed girl, who looks more like 18 than 12. She only seems to have eyes and ears for men, and treats all women with contempt and disgust. And she has everyone around her jumping through hoops.

Over time, as more details begin to emerge about Sophia s past, it becomes clear that her behaviour is a front for an early life filled with pain and suffering. But although Casey feels she is gradually breaking through to Sophia and getting her to open up about things she has never spoken about before, her violence is threatening the safety of the whole family, forcing Casey to question whether she can really handle this lost and damaged girl.

Both shocking and inspiring, this true story will shed new light on the extreme and sometimes dangerous nature of foster care."

Attaching in Adoption is a comprehensive guide for prospective and actual adoptive parents on how to understand and care for their adopted child and promote healthy attachment. This classic text provides practical parenting strategies designed to enhance children's happiness and emotional health. It explains what attachment is, how grief and trauma can affect children's emotional development, and how to improve attachment, respect, cooperation and trust. Parenting techniques are matched to children's emotional needs and stages, and checklists are included to help parents assess how their child is doing at each developmental stage. The book covers a wide range of issues including international adoption, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, and learning disabilities, and combines sound theory and direct advice with case examples throughout. This book is a must read for anyone interested in adoption and for all adoptive families. It will also be a valuable resource for adoption professionals.

A child's capacity to cope with adversity and 'stand on their own two feet' is seen as critical to their development, well-being, and future independence and success in adulthood. Psychological strength, or resilience, directly affects a child's capacity to cope with adversity. This book provides a succinct, accessible and clear guide on how to promote resilience in children and achieve positive developmental outcomes for them. The author covers three key factors that affect resiliency: vulnerability to stress and anxiety, attachment relationships, and access to basic needs. For each, the author presents practical advice and strategies, such as how to regulate children's stress and anxiety, how to encourage and maintain secure attachments, and how to assure children that their needs are understood and will be met. The model presented will help parents and carers ensure their children grow up happy, healthy and resilient. This book will be invaluable for parents, carers and practitioners in supportive roles caring for children.

Little Jamey, 21/2 years old, is placed with experienced foster carer, Cathy Glass, as an emergency. The police and social services have no choice but to remove two-year-old Jamey from home after his mother leaves him alone all night to go out partying. When he first arrives with foster carer Cathy Glass, he is scared, hungry and withdrawn, craving the affection he has been denied for so long. He is small for his age and unsteady on his feet - a result of being left for long periods in his cot. Cathy and her family find Jamey very easy to love, but as he settles in and makes progress, a new threat emerges. Coronavirus and lockdown change everything.

Just when Casey thinks her foster care duties are done, she's asked to look after Sam, a troubled nine-year-old with a violent streak who drove his previous guardians to release him of their care. It soon unfolds, however, that this is no simple case. Determined to get to the root of Sam's behaviour, Casey is committed to uncover his mysterious past only to find out something far darker than she ever imagined... Having recently said goodbye to their last foster child, Miller, the Watson family are taking a bit of a break. But it's while Casey is having fun catching up with her friends that she receives a call from her new link worker. Social services are desperately trying to find a settled home for nine-year-old Sam, who has Autism and some serious behavioural problems. Removed from his mother less than a week ago, Sam has been staying with respite carers. But with two young children of their own, they now find themselves unable to hold on to the little boy as he is bullying them relentlessly. It's not an isolated situation, either. Apparently Sam's own siblings begged not to be placed with their older brother - they were both adamant that they were too afraid of him. The Watsons agree to accommodate Sam, who, despite his tiny stature, turns out to be quite the whirlwind - destroying anything and everything in his path. In addition to the outward behaviours, it quickly becomes evident that there is a much darker past that has blighted the boy's life. As Casey tries to get to the bottom of it, she discovers there are no files on Sam; only the testament of his previous neighbour. Thankfully, Mrs Gallagher is only too happy to help. And to talk. But it soon transpires that there is a great deal more to Sam's secret history...