What Surprises New Foster Parents the Most About Fostering? - Weekend Wisdom
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care
09/10/23
•7m
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Periodically, we survey our online community, and we asked foster parents about what surprised them about fostering?
Resources:
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
Helping Parent and Kids Manage Phones, Internet, and Gaming
September 6, 2023
•50m
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How old is too young for a phone? Is gaming harmful to our kids? How much technology is too much. We talk with Dr. Jay Berk, a licensed psychologist and an expert in working with children and families. He is the author of two books: “A Parent’s Quick Guide to Electronic Addiction” and “Codeswitching: Social Skills in the Screen-Age”.
In this episode, we cover:
Parents from time immemorial have worried about the impact of the “new technology” and this goes back to our great great great grandparents worrying about the influence of novels to parents of the 50’s worry about too much time on the phone, to parents of the 80s worrying about too much TV, and on to the present where we worry about screen time, texting, and gaming.
- We parents are digital “immigrants” while our kids are digital natives. How does this dynamic present challenges?
- How to keep up with what our kids are doing?
- What are the general best practices for elementary aged kids using digital technology?
- What age should kids be given a phone?
- What are reasonable rules for phone use?
- How do things change as our kids each around age 11 or 12 and on into their teen years
- How important is the use of digital media to socialize for this generation?
- When should parents worry?
- Is the child getting enough sleep?
- Are they eating well?
- Are they getting enough exercise?
- Are they doing well in school?
- Do they have real life friends?
- If so, they are probably just fine.
- What are the signs that our kids may be too involved with digital technology or gaming
- How much screen time is too much for tweens? For teens?
- Do different types of technology have different risks and benefits? Internet? Gaming? Porn?
- What are some reasonable rules for families to set in regards to technology, screen time, and gaming?
- How to get buy-in from our tweens and teens?
- App-tell kid
- A challenge particular to families adopting or fostering older children or teens is that often our kids come to us with having had little supervision or rules about internet use? How can we establish healthy habits when the rules are new to them?
Resources:
- A Parent’s Quick Guide to Electronic Addiction by Dr. Jay Berk
- Center for Parent and Teen Communication: A Fact-Not-Fear Approach to Parenting In the Digital Age https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aNtRhYfA3k
- Creating a Family’s Navigating the Internet with Adopted or Foster Tweens and Teens https://creatingafamily.org/adoption-category/adoption-blog/navigating-the-internet-with-adopted-or-foster-tweens-and-teens/
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.
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 Your Child Cope With Living in a Scary World
September 13, 2023
•51m
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Is your child scared of school shootings, tornadoes, climate change, and on and on? Do you want to learn how to help them not get stuck in these fears? Join us as we talk with Dr. Melissa Goldberg Mintz is a clinical psychologist based in Houston, Texas. She is the author of the book, "Has Your Child Been Traumatized: How to Know and What to Do to Promote Healing and Recovery."
In this episode, we cover:
- The world feels scary.
- Covid
- School shootings
- Police shootings
- Weather event
- Wildfires
- Our kids are struggling.
- Pediatric mental health hospitalizations have increased and intensified. More than eight in 10 public schools have seen stunted behavioral and social-emotional development in their students since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 57 percent of teen girls and 29 percent of teen boys reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” over the past year.
- Many of the children being raised by the parents in our audience have experienced trauma before, but it feels like more kids are being shaken by current events.
- Is there a distinction between trauma with a “T” and little “t” trauma?
- How do we know if our child has been traumatized, regardless of whether it is an event outside of their personal world or an event that they are involved in?
- What are the symptoms of trauma and how to they vary by age of the child? (pre-school, school-aged, adolescents)
- Why do some kids seem to take all the troubling world events in stride while others struggle? And why do some kids seem to bounce back quickly from troubling events that happen to them directly? What makes a child resilient?
- The top question on most parents’ mind is, “Will my child be OK?”
- What can parents do to help when their child is struggling with coping with all the scary things in our world?
- It’s tempting to be lenient and not enforce rules when we see our child struggling. Is this the best approach?
- What life skills can parents teach that will help their child be more resilient and able to cope with scary world events?
- How do we know if our child is stuck and not moving past their fears with our help?
- What types of therapy are available and how can parents decide which one would be best for their child?
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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