Being aware of the severe impact of trauma on child development that comes from difficult environments, starting this month, we introduced a new area in Foster to Adopt program structure: equipping parents with skills to care for traumatized foster children. This type of training has been adapted from Dr. Karyn Purvis and Dr. David Cross’s developed program and the TCU Institute of Child Development in Texas, training in which the LOC staff took part in three sessions.

Caregiver training is offered by our professional, clinical staff to help foster parents, adoptive parents, and group home/orphanage caregivers to know how to better parent kids that come from difficult places. Our goal is that every caregiver would become competent in understanding the COMPLEX DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA that most of these kids have gone through and are going through and that they would learn a better way of parenting these kids, long term, to see them thrive. Dr. Karyn Purvis says, “Behavior is the voice of children who have lost their voice.” We want to help kids to find their voices again so that bad behavior does not define them and so that they can become whole.

You can learn more by watching a seminar by Jayne Schooler on this topic by clicking HERE.

The training is five weeks long, one module per week, and is held in the foster homes. We wish to develop a new structured and educational relationship based culture among families, based on trust which will enable children to live feeling “safe” and the children are invited to participate in an interaction through play. So far we have implemented two modules in which both theoretical concepts and practical ways of intervention were presented.

The families are opened to new information, acknowledging the profound impact of the trauma and they are embracing these concepts.