Talking with Children About Adoption at Different Ages
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care
04/12/23
•61m
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Do you wonder how to talk to your child about adoption? What if they don't seem interested? How do you talk about some of the hard stuff? This episode explores talking with children about adoption at different ages with Mari Itzkowitz, with the Center for Adoption Support and Education (CASE). She is an adoption-competent therapist and leader of the CASE Training Team, providing training and education to professionals and parents.
In this episode, we cover:
- How does an adoptee’s understanding of adoption differ by age?
- Infants
- Toddlers & Preschoolers
- School Age
- Tweens
- Teens
- Young Adults
- Older Adults
- How to talk about adoption at different ages?
- Should you wait for the child to ask questions before you tell them about their adoption story?
- What if your child or youth shows little or no interest in their adoption story?
- How does openness or lack of openness impact a child’s understanding of adoption?
- Should adoptive parents bring up the idea of searching for birth family?
- How does transracial adoption impact a child’s understanding of adoption?
- Our focus is often on birth mothers. How can you talk about adoption and the role of the birth father with young children who do not understand the concept of sex?
- What to say when you know very little about the birth parents? How to handle hard birth parent stories? Should you tell a child that they were conceived by rape or that their birth mother is in jail or birth father suffers from addiction? At what age should you share this information?
Additional Resources:
- Resources on Talking about Adoption
- Building the Framework for Adopted & Foster Children to Process the Hard Parts of Their Stories
- Suggested books on talking with kids about birthparents
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
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
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
A Guide to Raising Your Grandchild
April 5, 2023
•56m
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We talk about raising your grandkids with Christine Adamec, coauthor with Dr. Andrew Adesman, of The Grandfamily Guidebook. She and her husband have been raising their teenage grandson since his infancy.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why are grandparent led families increasing?
- What are some common emotions that grandparents and other kin experience when they realize that they need to step in and raise their grandchildren or other kin?
- What type of decisions should you make about legal custody or permanency? How to protect your grandchild? How to enroll them in school? How to be able to get medical and mental health care for them? How to prevent the child’s parents from removing the child from your home? Becoming a foster parent? A will?
- What are some of the strains that grandparents can experience with their children (the parents of their grandchildren)?
- How to navigate the relationship with your adult child?
- Explaining the situation to the child? (“Why am I living with you and not my parents?”)
- Raising kids that likely experience trauma, including prenatal exposure.
- Adjusting to parenting in this new time.
- Some of the joys of raising your grandchild.
Resources:
- AARP has a Benefits QuickLINK tool to find out if you or your grandchild may qualify for 15 public benefits — 10 for adults and families and five for children.
- Creating a Family podcast: Helping Parents & Kids Manage Phones, Internet, & Gaming
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
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
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
Helping Our Kids Regulate Big Emotions
April 19, 2023
•61m
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Does your child struggle with controlling their big emotions? Do they seem angry or frustrated most of the time? We've got some answers! Join us to listen to this interview with Dr. Stuart Shanker, a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Psychology at York University and author of several books, including Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Reframed: Self-Reg for a Just Society. He is also an adoptive dad.
In this episode, we cover:
- 3 basic principles of self-regulation:
- There is no such thing as a bad or lazy kid.
- No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there’s a way forward: self-regulation.
- All people can learn to self-regulate in ways that promote rather than constrict growth.
- There is no such thing as a "fixed outcome": trajectories can always be changed, at any point in the lifespan, if only we have the right knowledge and tools.
- There is no such thing as a bad or lazy kid.
- How can parents help their children become calmer when we live in a stressful, frantic, and over-stimulating world?
- How can parents calm themselves down in the hectic world?
- Five-step method for managing stress
- 1. Reframe behavior by learning the difference between misbehavior and stress behavior and the signs of each. (Why and why now?)
- 2. Recognize stressors.
- Some typical stressors broken out by age.
- Some “hidden stressors” that their children are struggling with - physiological as well as social and emotional.
- 3. Reduce stress (deep breathing (pizza breath), exercise, touch, music, pets)
- 4. Reflect on what it feels like to be calm and what it feels like to be overstressed.
- 5. Restoration- energy, balance, and relationship.
- These steps are not a program for managing a child’s behavior. Rather, these are five steps to promote understanding a child’s behavior.
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
Please leave us a rating or review RateThisPodcast.com/creatingafamily
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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