A Strong Family Starts with a Strong Foundation
Resources to gain insight and develop adoptive parenting skills
Educating yourself is one of the most beneficial and important ways to get ready for adoption. It can help you gain insight and parenting techniques, whether you’re a first-time parent or have years of experience. Parenting a child who has experienced foster care, trauma, and loss comes with many differences from raising a birth child. Becoming informed about how to parent children and teens who come from hard places will help you build a stronger foundation to meet them where they are with love, understanding, consistency, and stability so that they can feel safe and begin to heal.
Parenting
- Healthy Children
- Raising Children (Australian)
- Child Development Institute
- CDC - Child Development
- CDC - Essentials for Parenting Teens
- Center for Parent and Teen Communication
- Greater Good Science Center and Magazine
- NetSmartz, in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Trauma
Trauma-related articles are also on many of the foster and adoption-specific sites.
- Belonging Network (Canada) - Trauma-Informed Parenting Guide
- Trauma and Toxic Stress (MDHHS)
- National Child Traumatic Stress Network
- Child Trauma Academy
Education
Physical & Mental Health
- Association for Children's Mental Health (Michigan)
- KidsHealth
- The Kids Mental Health Foundation
- Child Mind Institute
- Understood
- American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry - Facts for Families Guide
- Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD)
- ADDitude
Free Online Webinars
Michigan State University - MSU’s School of Social Work offers free child welfare webinars for parents and caregivers, including ones on trauma and behaviors to help families strengthen their knowledge and support children’s needs.
Creating a Family - Site offers a variety of courses for foster, adoptive, and kinship families. They also have many additional resources on their site. Through the support of the Jockey Being Family program, families can access select courses for free by clicking the code link on the course's page or entering a coupon code (JBFStrong) at checkout.
Center for Adoption and Support Education (CASE) - Each month, CASE offers a Strengthening Your Family webinar with free registration sponsored by the Jockey Being Family program, using a coupon code posted on the webinar’s sign-up page. Jockey also provides a separate coupon code (JOCKEY25) to access multiple in-demand webinars.
Children's Home Society of Minnesota (CHLSS) - CHLSS offers a wide selection of webinars for foster, adoptive, and kinship families. Topics include Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), emotional regulation, behavioral issues, sibling relationships, hair care, and more. Certificates are available upon completion, making these sessions especially beneficial for families.
Raise the Future - Site offers an extensive on-demand learning library of more than 170 webinars. Topics span the Seven Core Issues of Adoption, trauma, attachment, behavior, and more. While certificates are not provided, these sessions are a valuable resource for families.
National Foster Parent Association Training Institute (NFPA) - NFPA offers several free webinars for foster parents through its Training Institute. Be sure to click to the next page at the bottom to view them all.
Be sure to check back with us, as we'll be expanding our resource library!