Nurturing Attachments Training Resource is a complete group-work programme containing everything you need to run training and support sessions for adoptive parents and foster or kinship carers. Based on attachment theory and developed by expert author and trainer Kim Golding, this rich resource provides an authoritative set of ideas for therapeutically parenting children along with all the guidance you will need to implement the training. The training resource includes theoretical content and process notes for facilitators, and a range of activities supported by online downloadable content with photocopiable reflective diary sheets, activity sheets and handouts. It is structured into 3 modules with 6 sessions per module. Module 1: Provides an understanding of attachment theory, patterns of attachment and an introduction to therapeutic parenting. Module 2: Introduces the House Model of Parenting, providing guidance on how to help the children experience the family as a secure base. Module 3: Continues exploring the House Model of Parenting, with consideration of how parents can both build a relationship with the children and manage their behaviour. This will be an invaluable resource and one-stop guide for any professionals involved in training foster carers and adoptive parents, as well as residential child care workers and kinship carers.

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.

Written for busy foster carers and adoptive parents, this book provides a concise introduction to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and how to support a child with a diagnosis. It emphasises the common strengths children with ASD have, as well as offering strategies for any behavioural issues that are likely to arise, highlighting how these can be exacerbated by the care system and adoption process. The first part of the book looks at the different aspects of autism and the challenges it can pose for children and parents, providing strategies for managing difficulties at home and at school, using social stories, and reducing sensory input in a child's environment. The second part looks at issues that arise for fostered or adopted children, including placement transitions, contact, and explaining the past. It concludes with helping parents to think about self-care.

Foundations for Attachment Training Resource is a six-session programme to help parents and carers to nurture attachments with their child. It is designed specifically for those caring for children whose capacity to emotionally connect has been compromised as a result of attachment problems, trauma, and loss or separation. Informed by attachment theory and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), it consists of three core modules: * Understanding Challenges of Parenting * Therapeutic Parenting * Looking After Self It includes relevant theory and process notes for trainers, and a range of activities supported by electronic resources with downloadable activity sheets and handouts. This is a complete resource containing everything you need to run the sessions, and is perfect for any professionals involved in training foster carers, adoptive parents and kinship carers.

Die Arbeit beschaftigt sich mit einer praktisch sehr relevanten, in der wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung bisher eher wenig beachteten Problematik des Familienrechts - der Abwagung der rechtlichen Belange des Pflegekindes, der leiblichen Eltern und der Pflegeeltern. Hierbei wurde insbesondere der Versuch unternommen, unter Berucksichtigung der tatsachlichen und rechtlichen Seite einen Reformentwurf fur den Fall der Adoption des Pflegekindes durch seine Pflegeeltern zu entwickeln."

Positive and practical, this guide is designed to offer a route to recovery from grief and loss after adoption or long-term foster care. Children growing up in adoptive families or foster care often have complicated feelings about the loss of their birth parents - feelings which become all the more complex as they gain independence and become young adults, and which can endure throughout their lives. Common life events such as entering new relationships, building a family or losing a loved one can give rise to difficult questions about their own childhood and identity. In this book, Renee Wolfs provides an accessible explanation of the feelings of loss and grief commonly experienced by adults who grew up in adoptive families or foster care, and how debilitating they can be. She provides grounded advice and strategies to aid recovery and provides the reader with a useful tool: The Circle of Connecting. The Circle provides strategies for healing from loss, spanning all seven elements of your life: your body, mind, heart, environment, past, present and future. This book is essential reading for older teens and adults who need help in addressing feelings of grief and loss, as well as those who support them including adoptive and foster parents, social workers, counsellors and therapists.

Many people say being a parent is the toughest job there is. John DeGarmo, foster and adoptive parent, tells us just how tough it can be, having parented over 40 children. At times he and his wife, Kelly, have cared for up to nine children at a time, many with severe trauma and learning difficulties. Love and Mayhem is an honest and open account of the struggles, sadness and joy that comes with the job of being a parent to a traumatized child. From the sleepless nights with babies withdrawing from drug-addiction, to the heartbreak when a child moves on to another home, and the loving chaos that comes with a large and blended family, John DeGarmo fights for the many children who have come through his home. Ideal for foster families, general readers, fostering agencies and social workers who are looking for a true to life memoir of what it really is to be a foster parent.

Therapeutic Residential Care For Children and Youth takes a fresh look at therapeutic residential care as a powerful intervention in working with the most troubled children who need intensive support. Featuring contributions from distinguished international contributors, it critically examines current research and innovative practice and addresses the key questions: how does it work, what are its critical "active ingredients" and does it represent value for money? The book covers a broad spectrum of established and emerging approaches pioneered around with world, with contributors from the USA, Canada, Scandinavia, Spain, Australia, Israel and the UK offering a mix of practice and research exemplars. The book also looks at the research relating to critical issues for child welfare service providers: the best time to refer children to residential care, how children can be helped to make the transition into care, the characteristics of children entering and exiting care, strategies for engaging families as partners, how the substantial cost of providing intensive is best measured against outcomes, and what research and development challenges will allow therapeutic residential care to be rigorously compared with its evidence-based community-centered alternatives. Importantly, the volume also outlines how to set up and implement intensive child welfare services, considering how transferable they are, how to measure success and value for money, and the training protocols and staffing needed to ensure that a programme is effective. This comprehensive volume will enable child welfare professionals, researchers and policymakers to develop a refined understanding of the potential of therapeutic residential care, and to identify the highest and best uses of this intensive and specialized intervention.

Foster children are more likely than other children to be involved in risky activities online due to backgrounds of neglect and abuse, an absence of supportive adults, lower self-esteem, and greater exposure to drugs and alcohol. Covering all the dangers of online technology that your foster child might encounter, from cyberbullying and "sexting", to child grooming and online hoaxes, this book pays particular attention to dangers unique to foster families, such as the difficulties internet access poses for maintaining formal arrangements for contact with birth families. DeGarmo equips foster parents and professionals with strategies to keep foster children safe online, giving tips on establishing expectations for internet usage, advice on how to prevent inappropriate contact and protect personal information, and explaining the importance of "netiquette". An indispensable guide to negotiating online dangers, this is required reading for all foster families as well as residential child care workers, social workers and other professionals working with children in care.

Across Europe young people in public care are around five times less likely to attend tertiary education than those who have not been in care. This book provides a comprehensive account of why this shocking discrepancy exists and outlines ways to address the imbalance. Drawing extensively on a substantial three-year long European Union funded research project led by the authors, this book examines the participation of young people in care in further and higher education in Europe. It provides a historical and legislative overview of the topic and in-depth national case studies look at the situation in England, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Hungary. The authors set out clearly what we can learn from these cross-national comparisons and how to create more equal opportunities for children and young people in care. This important book will be essential reading for researchers and policy makers working on child welfare or young people in care, including government and local authority policy-makers, managers of children's and education services, school governors, and academics working in the fields of education, sociology, psychology, social work and social policy.

When you decide to foster, you are faced with many difficult decisions, dilemmas and questions: How do you navigate the daily struggles of foster parenting? How can you nurture bonds with your foster child who is angry, sad, and defiant? How can you prepare to step back when it's time to let go? Foster Parenting Step-by-Step is a concise how-to guide to fostering that summarizes what to expect as a foster parent, and gives immediate practical solutions. It outlines the different stages of a fostering relationship, raising common issues encountered at each age and how to tackle them. It also explains the impact of trauma on your child: how this can show itself through challenging behavior and how to respond to it. This book will provide fostering parents with the skills and knowledge to support the needs of the children in foster care. It will be invaluable not just to foster parents but also to those professionals supporting foster placements.

UNIVERSAL STORIES OF LONGING AND BELONGING Our quest for origin and, by extension, identity is universal to the human experience. For the twenty-five contributors to "Somebody's Child," the topic of adoption is not--and perhaps never can be--a neutral issue. With unique courage, each of them discusses their experience of the adoption process. Some share stories of heartbreak; others have discovered joy; some have searched for closure. "Somebody's Child" captures the many unforgettable faces and voices of adoption. The third book in a series of anthologies about the twenty-first-century family, "Somebody's Child" follows "Nobody's Mother" and "Nobody's Father," two essay collections from childless adults on parenthood, family and choices. Together, these three books challenge readers to reexamine traditional definitions of the concept of "family."

'A dark, gritty, and compulsive read' Daily Express Nineteen-year-old Sally is battered and bruised, and lying in the hospital once again. It's nothing new, it's happened before and it'll happen again. But when DI Laura Kesey introduces Sally to a new social worker, she finds hope at a local women's domestic violence refuge, where she's surrounded by women just like her. But then a man is mowed down in a hit and run. Soon a second suspicious death follows. Both deaths link back to the refuge. Has Sally found a safe place or a new danger? *Please note this is a re-release of The Sisters*

Fostering is vitally important: the majority of looked after children are fostered, yet these children are often left out of the agenda and their voices are not heard. This book sets out a child-centred approach to foster care which argues against thinking about children purely from a psychological perspective and instead places children's views, rights and needs at the centre of care. It sets out the theory behind working in partnership with children who are fostered, and discusses children's views about fostering systems and living with foster carers. The book then outlines how to put the theory into practice, offering models, processes and best practice examples. Practical advice is given on establishing effective communication and good working relationships between practitioners, carers and foster children. This insightful book aims to promote better services and outcomes for fostered children, and will be essential reading for social work practitioners and students.

The decision whether or not to reunify a child in care with their birth family is one of the most serious taken by children's services, and often involves considerable risk. This book examines the long-term consequences of this decision for children who entered public care for abuse or neglect. It compares the experiences and progress of children who remained in care or returned to their birth families up to four years after the decision was taken. It covers how the decision is made, the factors taken into account when making it and provides important suggestions for effective decision-making. It compares the progress made by the children in relation to their safety, stability and emotional well-being. The book demonstrates that, contrary to common belief, long-term care can be a positive option for maltreated children. This book provides important messages for reunification policy and practice in relation to maltreated children. It will be essential reading for social work practitioners, researchers and policy makers.

Like many adopted people, filmmaker Barbara Sumner yearned to know who her mother was. New Zealand's closed adoption laws made that almost impossible and coloured her chaotic adolescence and adult life. When she finally tracked her mother down, a longed-for reunion ended in tragedy. This remarkable, moving, beautifully written memoir explores Sumner's conviction that everyone who loses their mother suffers some degree of physiological damage. They are all grafted onto the tree of strangers.

A GARDA, A FORCED ADOPTION, A FIGHT FOR JUSTICE In 1984, Majella Moynihan was a fresh-faced young garda recruit when she gave birth to a baby boy. Charged with breaching An Garda Siochana's disciplinary rules - for having premarital sex with another guard, becoming pregnant, and having a child - she was pressured to give up her baby for adoption, or face dismissal. It forced her into a decision that would have devastating impacts on her life. Majella left the force in 1998 after many difficult years and, in 2019, following an RTE documentary on her case, she received an apology from the Garda Commissioner and Minister for Justice for the ordeal she endured as a young garda. Here, for the first time, she tells the full story. From an institutional childhood after the death of her mother when she was a baby, to realising her vocation of becoming a guard only to confront the reality of a police culture steeped in misogyny and prejudice, A Guarded Life is both a courageous personal account of hope and resilience in the darkest times, and a striking reflection on womanhood and autonomy in modern Ireland.

'A dark, gritty, and compulsive read' Daily Express Nineteen-year-old Sally is battered and bruised, and lying in the hospital once again. It's nothing new, it's happened before and it'll happen again. But when DI Laura Kesey introduces Sally to a new social worker, she finds hope at a local women's domestic violence refuge, where she's surrounded by women just like her. But then a man is mowed down in a hit and run. Soon a second suspicious death follows. Both deaths link back to the refuge. Has Sally found a safe place or a new danger? *Please note this is a re-release of The Sisters*