Attachment Dance - Weekend Wisdom
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care
05/24/25
•10m
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Question: For three months now, we’ve been fostering our 17-year-old son, with the intention of adopting. My question is regarding attachment. How can you tell if the child is setting up boundaries or testing you to see how hard you’ll pursue/run after them?
Resources:
- Creating and Cultivating Attachment (Resource page)
- Helping a Child Heal from Trauma (Resource page)
- Transitioning a Child to Your Home (Resource page)
Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.
Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
- Weekly podcasts
- Weekly articles/blog posts
- Resource pages on all aspects of family building
Previous Episode
How to Engage Kinship Caregivers
May 21, 2025
•46m
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Are you a professional working with kinship caregivers? You need to listen to this interview with Dr. Tyreasa Washington, is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar specializing in kinship care families (e.g., grandparents raising grandchildren). She is a Distinguished Senior Scholar for Child Welfare at Child Trends, the leading research organization in the United States focused solely on improving the lives of children, youth, and families.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Advantages of keeping children with extended family when their parents are not able to raise them.
- How do kids who are raised temporarily or permanently by relatives fare compared to kids placed with unknown foster parents?
- One of the biggest questions we receive from professionals is how to engage kinship caregivers. They tell us that they set up programs to support kinship caregivers, but few show up. This seems universal. Why does this happen?
- We also hear about institutional trauma-(law enforcement struggles/foster care system struggles- leads to lack of trust--not feeling safe in their community, not trusting DSS.) How does this impact kinship caregivers? How does it impact those of us trying to serve them?
- What types of support are the most helpful?
- What are some cultural differences you've observed in Black relatives raising children within the family, and how do these differences impact how professionals interact with kin raising children?
- What have you found in your research on the impact of caregiving on the health of kinship caregivers?
- Need for training for kinship caregivers.
- How can professionals support self-care with folks who are so busy just getting by?
Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.
Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
- Weekly podcasts
- Weekly articles/blog posts
- Resource pages on all aspects of family building
Next Episode
Raising a Biracial Child
May 28, 2025
•53m
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Are you raising a mixed-race child? Join our conversation with Nicole Doyley, a biracial woman raising biracial kids, and the author of What About the Children: 5 Values for Multiracial Families.
- Terminology: what is preferred-biracial, mixed race, multi-racial, mixed?
- Biracial includes Black/White, Black/Asian, White/Asian, Hispanic/Black, Indigenous/Black/Hispanic. In this interview, we are talking about mixed-race, but families can also be mixed culturally.
- Is it true that mixed-race is the fastest-growing group in the US?
- Issues facing biracial people in the US. Based on personal experience as well as a 2020 Vox Survey of Mixed Americans.
- No man’s land of racelessness
- Having to always answer the question “What are you?”
- Not fully accepted by either race
- Wanting to ditch one race so as to be fully the other race
- Feeling isolated
- Confused identity
- Rejecting the idea of having to fit into just one box
- As a child, you didn’t like the ambiguity that biracial brought to your life. You say you felt a “two-ness”. But you came to view being of mixed race as a blessing rather than a curse. Why, as a child did it feel uncomfortable to you and how did you grow to accept it?
- Do you think a mixed-race adopted or foster child being raised by parents of a different race from them but the same shared race with each other will face different challenges?
- In the past, it was common to tell adoptive/foster/grandparents that the world was going to treat their child as Black (or another race), so you should focus your efforts on raising a Black child and not emphasize their other race. People in the US see race first. How should parents handle it?
- Does it matter if the child’s dominant features make her look like she fits more squarely in one race?
- 5 values for raising a biracial child:
- Awareness
- Humility
- Diversity
- Honesty
- Exploration
- Benefits/advantages to being mixed-race:
- Can function in both majority and minority environments
- Tips for Raising a Mixed-Race Child
Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.
Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
- Weekly podcasts
- Weekly articles/blog posts
- Resource pages on all aspects of family building
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