Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Marriage or Partnership (While Raising Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children)
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care
03/25/26
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Raising kids impacted by adoption, foster care, or kinship care can do a number on your marriage or life partnership. Join us for a conversation with Jeremy & Jara Walden, authors of The Heart Work of Foster Care: A Hopeful and Honest Guide to Foster Parenting, about strategies to re-prioritize and strengthen your most significant relationship.
In this episode, we discuss:
- How can raising kids together enhance a marriage or relationship?
- Why are kids in our community often harder to parent?
- Trauma, loss, neglect
- Prenatal substance exposure
- Challenging behaviors that come from those experiences
- Why and how might our kids’ needs test our adult relationships?
- What are some of the additional stressors our relationships may face when fostering or adopting kids who’ve been exposed to trauma?
- What are some challenging behaviors kids who’ve experienced trauma can bring that might be particularly difficult for the marriage?
- What are some signs that we may be neglecting or at least not maintaining our significant relationship?
- How does your history impact your marriage, while raising kids with trauma impacts?
- Can you offer specific strategies for “going back,” healing, or re-prioritizing our marriages or partnerships if we are listening to this and realize we haven’t done so?
- How do single parents prioritize the adult relationships that they value?
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
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Question: We have two children adopted through the foster care system as infants - an almost 10-year-old (AudHD) and a 4.5-year-old (neurotypical). They both come into our room every night in the middle of the night, and it really disturbs my sleep and my husband's sleep. It seems like we've tried everything to get them to stop. Recently, we told them we were going to start locking our door, but then they just come and knock and knock until one of us gets up. If we try to put them back in their own beds, they make us lie down with them until they fall asleep - then I can't get back to sleep after that. Not sure how to handle this situation.
Resources:
- Sleep Issues with Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children
- Why Won't My Child Sleep?! (And What Can I Do?)
- Help! My Newly Placed Child is Regressing on Sleep
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
Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!
A Lifebook is the story of how your child came to be yours and the story of his life before he came to you. Adoption is only one aspect of your child, and at some point, his life merges into your life. However, he had a life before he came to your family, and his Lifebook tells this part of his story.
Resources:
- Adoption Lifebooks (Suggested Books)
- Welcoming an Older Child to Your Home (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
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