Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

How does parenting an adopted teen differ from parenting teens that come to us through birth? What are some of the unique challenges adopted teens or young adults face? Check out our interview with Katie Naftzger, an LCSW, Korean adoptee, and the author of “Parenting in the Eye of the Storm: The Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Teen Years.”

In this episode, we cover:

• Why is parenting an “adopted” teen any different from parenting a child who comes to you by birth?
• What issues related to adoption come to the front during the teen years?
• What issues that relate to early neglect or abuse, or loss come to the fore in adolescence?
• In your book, “Parenting in the Eye of the Storm: The Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Teen Years,” you talk about adoptive or foster parents taking a learning stance when working with teens. What is a learning stance?
• Many of our kids have experienced early life adversity and carry the scars of this early trauma. Parents often naturally feel bad for their teens because of this. How can these feelings of pity interfere with the healthy parenting of teens? When to step in and help and when to let our teens figure out how to handle things on their own?
• Some adoptive parents adopt out of a feeling of needing to save the child. How does the savior narrative impact parenting teens?
• Birth family issues:
  • Birth parents search
  • Handling hard birth parent situations
  • Identity formation-nature vs. nurture
  • Navigating an open adoption with teens
• Identity formation as a transracial adoptee.
• Transitioning into adulthood.
• We hear that adopted teens are more likely to have mental health issues and more likely to commit suicide. How do adoptive parents support their adopted 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. 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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

Did your child experience trauma or loss before they came to you? Do you want to help them heal? Join our conversation with Dr. Amanda Baden, a Professor and the Doctoral Program Director at Montclair State University in the graduate counseling program and a licensed psychologist in private practice in Manhattan. She is an adult adoptee from Hong Kong and an adoptive parent of a daughter from China.

In this episode, we cover:

• What is trauma?
• What types of events/things create trauma?
• Why are trauma, abuse, and neglect so harmful to children?
• Is neglect a form of trauma?
• How trauma impacts children, and what factors influence how much the trauma impacts the child later in life?
• How to tell the difference between typical developmental behavior and behavior that is the result of trauma or loss?
• What is triangulation?
• How to break the triangle?
• Helping our kids integrate their birth, adoptive or foster, and self-identities. Many children who do not live with their birth families struggle to incorporate parts of their birth families, foster or adoptive families, and who they innately are into a whole that is their identity. How can parents help their children form a healthy, complete identity?  
• Practical tips for helping children heal. Often, we do not know exactly what trauma our children have experienced. Either they don’t remember, or it happened before they were verbal, or they cannot or have not told us. How can we help them if we do not know what happened to them?

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

Have you wondered if you could be the right place for an LGBTQ+ youth or child to land? Join us to talk about how to be an affirming and supportive home for LGBTQ+ youth. Or guest will be Angela Weeks, the Director of the National SOGIE Center at the Institute for Innovation and Implementation. Under the Center, she directs the Center of Excellence for LGBTQ+ Behavioral Health Equity and the National Quality Improvement Center on Tailored Services, Placement Stability, and Permanency for LGBTQ2S Children and Youth in Foster Care.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why are these young people over represented in child welfare?
• LGBTQ+ youth are 1.5 -2 times more likely to have a foster placement failure. Why?
• What does the research indicate about how sexual orientation and gender identity are formed?
• Are LGBTQ+ youth more likely to have a mental health diagnosis or behavioral issues.
• Are LGBTQ+ youth more likely than heterosexual or cisgender young people to sexually abuse or otherwise pose a threat to others, including children?
• How to help youth evaluate the safety of their communities, schools, social networks, and homes to decide whether to disclose their LGBTQ+ identity, when to do so, and to whom.
• Parents often think, especially with younger kids, that this is just a phase. And kids are coming out (acknowledging their sexual orientation/gender identity to themselves and others) at younger and younger ages. And there is some fluidity. So how’s a parent to know how to handle?
  • Studies by the Family Acceptance Project have found that most people report being attracted to another person around age 10 and identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual by age 13 (on average). Most children have a stable sense of their gender identity by age 4
• Sexual orientation vs sexual behavior.
• How can parents create a welcoming and affirming home?

Additional Resources:

• Supporting LGBTQ+ Youth: A Guide for Foster Parents https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/lgbtqyouth.pdf
• Glossary of Terms (Human Rights Campaign) 
• The National SOGIE Center. The National Center for Youth with Diverse Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, & Expression provides a centralized site for accessing resources on providing culturally responsive care to children, youth, and young adults with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (SOGIE) and their families across systems, including child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health (including school mental health), substance use systems, and housing and homelessness. https://www.sogiecenter.org/
• Family Acceptance Project® LGBTQ Youth & Family Resources To Decrease Mental Health Risks & Promote Well-Being https://lgbtqfamilyacceptance.org/
• Learning About Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Expression (SOGIE) (Video)
• A Guide for Understanding, Supporting, and Affirming LGBTQI2-S Children, Youth, and Families
• Support for LGBTQ Youth Starts at Home (Video) 
• Be True and Be You: A Basic Guide for LGBTQ+ Youth
• Sharing Our Lived Experiences: 22 Tips for Caring for Two-Spirit and Native LGBTQ Youth in the Child Welfare System

This podcas

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

How do you handle a birth parent showing up to a meeting with the child stoned or drunk? What do you do when a birth parent often breaks promises to the child? Join us to talk about nine sticky situations that adoptive parents often find themselves in. Our guest is Lori Holden, the author of The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole.

In this episode, we cover:

• What do we mean by openness and why is openness or some form of a relationship considered best for adopted kids?
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #1: Birth Parent Addiction to drugs or alcohol.
  • How to handle things when a birth parent shows up for a meeting with a child high or stoned.
  • How to set healthy boundaries with birth parents who are addicted? How to set these boundaries when you have an open adoption with a birth parent dealing with addiction?
  • Explaining drug addiction of birth parents to children.
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #2: Failing to show up for meetings/visits or showing up late?
  • Determining the cause.
  • How do you protect your child from disappointment?
  • How to handle it if the parents are struggling with substance abuse disorder.
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #3: Making promises they can’t or won’t keep. 
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #4: Should you maintain any type of relationship with a birth parent who abused or neglected the child? 
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #5: How should parents deal with the obvious difference between openness in multiple adoptions within the same family?
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #6: DNA testing. If the birth parents have not told others about the child, what obligation do you have to their desires regarding DNA testing on the child? What if there are medical reasons for doing the testing?
• Difficult/Sticky Situation # 7: When the adoptive parent is the problem. Over-reacting, assuming the worst intentions, etc.
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #8: Birth family doesn’t want contact. 
• Difficult/Sticky Situation #9: Birth siblings being parented by the birth parents.
• Why should parents try to maintain relationships with the birth family in difficult situations?

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

When should your child get a smartphone? What can you do if your child spends too much time playing video games? How can we protect our kids from the downsides of social media? Join us to talk about parenting and technology with Krista Boan, co-founder of the nonprofit Screen Sanity.

In this episode, we cover:

Digital Health: 

• Screen Sanity’s 5 Rules of Thumb.
• Ride, practice, drive” approach for device and app introduction.
• How to handle a foster, adoptive, or kinship placement of a child that has already gone down that slippery slope of too much screen time and tech. How do you establish reasonable boundaries?
• Is it still recommended that parents establish a "no expectation of privacy" policy for online activity? At what age/stage should that start to change?
• How to handle when your family has vastly different rules from your child’s friend’s families when you don’t want your child to feel left out? 

Screentime:

• What is a reasonable rule of thumb for how much screen time a child should be allowed by age?
• What is considered screen time?
  • School work?
  • Facetime with family or friends? 
  • Drawing or coding games?
  • Social media?
• How do we handle cell phones and tablets when we see more negative behavior from any usage? 

Smartphones:

• At what age should a child be given a smartphone? What questions should you ask before you give a child a smartphone?
• What are the alternatives to a smartphone? What are good starter phones? 

Video Games:

• How to manage the addictive nature of video games?
• How to strike the balance between limiting the time of video games when this is where many kids socialize.
• Screen Sanity’s Video Game Decision Tree 

Social Media:

• What are the pitfalls, and how can we protect our kids?
• When should kids be allowed to be on social media? 
• How can parents keep up with what their kids are doing on social media?
• The Social Media Playbook is a parent-child workbook for starting powerful conversations about social media. Families are prompted to dig deeper into the purpose of social media in their lives and question the false standards it places on its users. 

Pornography:

• How do we protect our kids and youth from pornography?
• Good Pictures, Bad Pictures book

Screen Sanity has parent guides, training, webinars, and study groups. 

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

Kari Dady joins us to talk about applying the guiding principles of Trust-Based Relational Intervention® to typical parenting situations. Kari Dady is a Regional Training & Consultation Specialist with the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development. She is also an adoptive mom who uses the TBRI® approach daily in her family.

In this episode, we cover:

• What is parental attachment style, and how does it influence how we parent?
• How does trauma affect the developing child? 
• What are some of the different types of trauma that impact a child?
• What are the core principles of Trust-Based Relational Intervention®(TBRI®)?
• TBRI® talks about parents needing to make a mindset shift when looking at challenging behavior.  What is this mindset shift?
• How can parents apply Trust-Based Relational Intervention®(TBRI®) to the following common behaviors:
  • Inability to accept rules, restrictions, or the word “no”
  • Tantrums, 
  • Whining
  • Sleep issues
  • Lying
  • Stealing

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

Do you have a child that is more—louder, more energetic, more argumentative, more everything? Intense children can be harder to raise, but their intensity is a gift as well as a parenting challenge. We talk with Howard Glasser, creator of the Nurtured Heart Approach to parenting. He is the author of Transforming the Difficult Child and Transforming the Intense Child Workbook.

In this episode, we cover:

• What do you consider to be an intense child? My child was “more”—more loud, more energy—their reaction to most things was simply more. They go from 5 mph to 60mph in about a second. How to raise the intense child.
• What are the labels and diagnoses that intense children often accumulate? ADHD, ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder), conduct disorder, PTSD, anxiety disorder, depression.
• What makes some kids more “intense” than others? 
• What do you mean by energy-challenged kids? Unable to handle or effectively control their physical, cognitive or emotional energy. They have a disorder of self-control. They have more energy than they have self-control.
• Energy is a gift as well as a challenge.
• You mention in Transforming the Difficult Child that many intense or difficult kids love video games—more so than the average child.  Why? 
• Structure-while I think all children need structure, the high-intensity child really needs structure. Positive forms of structure vs. negative forms of structure
• Traditional parenting techniques did not work well for my intense little wonder. Your approach to raising an intense child is based on your Nurturing Heart Approach as outlined in your book, Transforming the Difficult Child and Transforming the Intense Child Workbook. What are the basic principles of this approach to parenting? The 3 strands.
• Strand 1: Refuse to energize the negative. What are some of the challenges parents face when applying this? What are some common ways we might accidentally energize the negative?
• Strand 2: Energize the positive. active recognition, experiential recognition, proactive recognition, creative recognition.
• Is there a problem with too much praise?
• Strand 3: Absolute clarity on limits and consequences. How to set limits?
• Intensity is not something that a person outgrows.

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

Do you worry that your decision to foster or adopt will hurt the kids you are already raising? Check out this podcast with Dr. Jana Hunsley, an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Dallas, trauma therapist, TBRI® Practitioner, and founder of Project 1025.

In this episode, we cover:
Fostering

• What are some of the common impacts of fostering on children already in the family? Both potentially negative and positive.
• What does your research show on how significant and how often children already in the home are negatively impacted by fostering?
• Should you Include kids in the decision to foster? If so, how does that look at different ages?
• For children already in the home, is there a better age to start fostering because of their ability to understand what the family is doing?
• Is it harder to introduce a foster child when there is only one existing child in the home. Do only children have a harder time adjusting?
• How much information about the new child should you share with the other kids in the home?

Adoption

• How do the impacts of adopting differ from the impacts of fostering? 
  • With adoption you usually have more time.
  • The child may already be living with you.
  • Adoption is for forever, while fostering is usually temporary.
  • You may care more about creating a lasting sibling relationship between the children.
• How much of a say should you give kids already in the family over whether you adopt?

Common Worries

• The new child may have developed behaviors that helped them survive in their prior home or are the physical symptoms of the trauma they experienced, such as tantrums, stealing, cursing, etc. Parents worry that these behaviors will rub off on their child.
• How to handle possible behaviors that could be harmful to kids already in the family. For example, acting out sexually with the other kids.
• New foster kids and some kids being placed for adoption have often had a diet higher in processed foods. How to handle this difference if you don’t want the kids in the family to eat too much processed foods.
• The lack of time and attention will hurt kids already in the family.

Tips for Parents

How can parents lessen the impact and increase the benefits of fostering or adopting for kids already in the family.

• Prepare children in the family in advance. What do children in the home need to be prepared for? (Differs significantly depending on the age of all the children involved)
• How to handle rule differences and behavioral expectations.
• How to handle the differing privileges and expectations that may have been assigned to kids by age in the past but age may not be the best measure or gauge now. For example, staying at home alone while dad runs to the store. Or bedtimes. Or visits alone to grandparents.
• How to prepare your children for the time commitment a new child will require to avoid feeling of jealousy? How to find time for all the kids.
• How to avoid secondary trauma in existing kids and how to recognize it.

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

Support the show

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

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks!

What happens when identical twins born in Vietnam are separated by adoption, with one adopted by a US family and one adopted by a Vietnamese family? Join us to talk with Erika Hayasaki, a journalist and author of Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family.

In this episode, we cover:

• The story.
• Twin studies.
• Adoption studies.
• The similarities of the twins in your story and in twin studies.
• The differences between the twins in your story and in twin studies.
• Reuniting
• How did the twins' reunion affect them, their family in Vietnam, and their adopted family in the US?
• Complications that the disparate degrees of wealth caused.
• Adoptive parents’ role in reunion.

Twin studies referenced:

• Polderman, T., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. et al. Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nat Genet 47, 702–709 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285
• Website based on the research cited above: MaTCH. This website provides a resource for the heritability of all human traits that have been investigated with the classical twin design. The traits have been classified into 28 broad trait domains, as well as according to the standard classification schemes of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) or the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). Currently, the database includes information from 2748 papers, published between 1958 and 2012, reporting on 17804 traits on a total of 14,558,903 twin pairs. https://match.ctglab.nl/#/home

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

Support the show

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