Link to Recording: Watch Here
Link to Handouts: Powerpoint, Attachment, Trauma and the Seven Core Issues Adoption Permanency, Words-Matter-Fostering-Families-Today, The Seven Core Issues Workbook for Children and Teens_Author Flyer, Tips to Talk About the Tough Stuff Maxon Parent, Using the Workbook for Parents and Professionals Maxon 2023, Seven Core Issues handout 2024 Maxon
The experience of adoption and permanency for constellation members creates lifelong, intergenerational issues, complexities and opportunities. Trauma, neglect and multiple attachment disruptions have a significant negative impact on a child’s social, emotional, cognitive and physiological development. What are children supposed to do with all the pain, grief, distress, hurt, rejection, shame and anger they carry inside their bodies and minds?
The lingering effects of early relational (attachment) trauma and neglect can last a lifetime, unless all of the adults, both parents and professionals, assist the child in healing from the effects of these traumatic losses and experiences. Learning the complex skills of identifying what we feel, why we feel it and communicating those feelings to someone who cares, is even more important for a child with complex trauma.
Supporting the whole family means that we, as professionals, must continue to evolve our knowledge base, resources and supportive services to ensure that parents and families who are in the ‘trauma trenches’ with children/youth have what they need to feel successful in their parenting journey. Parents and families provide belonging, rootedness and attachment security - it is the relational permanency that is the healing mechanism for the child. The family is the intervention (therapy). It is our job to attune to the needs of the family and parents who are providing the most intensive form of relational healing that a child/youth can experience.
Learning Objectives:
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Participants will learn the Seven Core Issues in Adoption/Permanency as a way of understanding the lifelong, intergenerational losses, challenges and tasks for the child/youth/adoptee, foster/kinship/adoptive parents and birth/first parents.
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Participants will be able to identify various types and symptoms of traumatic loss for children, as well as ways to intervene to help children identify, understand and express painful or unprocessed experiences.
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Participants will recognize the signs of complex developmental trauma in children/youth, especially as it relates to attachment disruptions, neglect, and lack of attachment security; which leaves the child/youth in a constant state of hyper-arousal (toxic stress) or distress, without the connection, rootedness, belonging, and the committed relational permanency needed to heal from earlier attachment or relational trauma.
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Participants will learn to use the conceptual framework of the seven core issues as way to assess and understand the needs of complex family systems connected to kinship care, foster care and adoption.
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Participants will learn the basic clinical orientation for family attachment therapy that is trauma-informed and adoption/permanency competent; necessary to empower growth and healing for all members of the family system impacted by foster care, kinship and adoption.
Presenters:
Allison Davis Maxon, M.S., LMFT is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of child welfare and children’s mental health specializing in Attachment, Developmental Trauma and Permanency/Adoption. She is the Executive Director of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency and was the foster care consultant for the Paramount Pictures movie Instant Family. Allison was honored in 2017 with the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute ‘Angels in Adoption’ award and is the co-author of Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency: A Guide to Promoting Understanding and Healing in Adoption, Foster Care, Kinship Families and Third Party Reproduction, Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2019) and The Seven Core Issues Workbook for Parents of Traumatized Children and Teens: A Guide to Help You Explore Feelings and Overcome Emotional Challenges in Your Family, Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2022). Her newest book is The Seven Core Issues for in Adoption and Permanency Workbook for Children and Teens: A Trauma-Informed Resource, Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2023).