Pre-adoption classes, Page 2

MEETING 3
Losses and Gains: The Need to be a Loss Expert
Explores the impact of separation on the growth and development of children, and the impact of foster care and adoptive placement on the emotions and behaviors of children and parents. Examines personal losses (death, divorce, infertility, children leaving home) and how difficult life experiences affect success as adoptive parents or foster parents. Emphasizes the partnership roles of foster parents, adoptive parents, and social workers in turning separation losses into gains.

MEETING 4
Helping Children with Attachments
Explores the subject of attachment and child development. Focuses on how attachments are formed and the special needs of children in foster care and adoption (especially in the areas of building self-concept and appropriate behavior). Discusses the partnership roles of foster parents, adoptive parents, and child welfare workers in helping children form new attachments.

MEETING 5
Helping Children Learn to Manage Their Behaviors
Discusses techniques for managing behavior, with an emphasis on alternatives to physical punishment. Topics include special issues in discipline for children who have been physically or sexually abused or neglected. Techniques to be discussed include being a "behavior detective," reinforcement, time out, mutual problem solving, structuring and setting limits, negotiating, and contracting.

MEETING 6
Helping Children with Birth Family Connections
Examines the importance of helping children in care maintain and build upon their identity, self-concept, and connections. Considers issues such as how children's cultures and ethnic backgrounds help shape their identity; the connections children risk losing when they enter care; and why visits and contacts with birth families and previous foster families are important.

MEETING 7
Gains and Losses: Helping Children Leave Foster Care
Discusses family reunification as the primary case planning goal as well as alternatives like foster care, adoption, and independent living. Examines disruption and its impact on children, families, and agency staff. This meeting also focuses on the partnership role of child welfare workers, foster parents, and adoptive parents in helping children move home, into an adoptive home or into independent living.

MEETING 8
Understanding the Impact of Fostering or Adopting
In the previous meetings, we discussed and "felt" what foster care and what adoption are all about. We learned about separation and attachment, how to build and maintain relationships with children and how to support them in working out the emotions they have for the important people in their lives. We've devoted a lot of time to the roles of both the foster parents and the adoptive parents, and the special way they will improve the lives of many children and families. But what will be the impact of all this effort on the foster families and adoptive families? How will this experience affect their marriage, children, relatives, friends, job, and income? In Meeting 8, we find out!

MEETING 9
Perspectives in Adoptive and Foster Parenting
This meeting is open to all members of prospective foster and adoptive families, especially children, grandparents, close friends—anyone who will play a major role in the foster family or adoptive family. This meeting features guest foster families and adoptive families. The guests will talk about their personal experiences in fostering and adopting. Some of the topics include: impact on marriage and family, visiting parents, discipline, searching, helping children with family reunification, and making adoptions work. Other panel members may be attorneys, social workers, and birth parents.

MEETING 10
Endings and Beginnings
The important tasks of this meeting will be to assess group members' strengths and needs as foster parents or adoptive parents. There also will be some time to say good-bye ... the ending. As the preparation/mutual selection process is coming to an end, so begins the transition into becoming a foster family or adoptive family ... the beginning.

© Excerpted from Adoption.com Guide to Foster Adoption, published by Adoption Media, LLC

Credits: Kelly L. Killian