‘Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions. A training manual for case workers’ is not only useful for people involved in moving children from institutions to families to increase their knowledge and awareness about the effects of institutionalisation and how they can support families to help children catch up. Because it gives detailed information about how care in institutions differs from care in families and in what ways this causes harm, it also provides important ‘ammunition’ for advocacy for alternative care reform towards family-based care and family strengthening.
Continue reading “Advocacy Material from Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions”Tag: #challengingbehaviour
Audio Version of the Training Manual for Case Workers
I am proud to announce the audio version of all 17 chapters of ‘Understanding the Trauma of Children from Institutions. A training manual for caseworkers’ are now all available to order for a small price at the web shop of this website. You can order the chapters individually, or all 17 together (in which case the price will be reduced to include taxes in the 1 euro fee per chapter and the Conclusion is added free of charge) HERE.
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A Taste of The New Book
My new book “Understanding the Trauma of Institutionalised Children. To support the child you adopt.” is about to come out/has just come out. Here, I want to give you a little taste of what it is about, with an excerpt:
Continue reading “A Taste of The New Book”Lived Experience of Family Preservation
The impression often exists that it is easy for the experts to talk about things like the need for deinstitutionalisation, for family strengthening, for community services, for helping families take care of their children with disabilities. It is easy to talk about all of these things in theory, but what do they know about the difficulties of the daily reality of these situations. I cannot answer this question for other experts, but in my case, the answer is: quite a lot.
Continue reading “Lived Experience of Family Preservation”Behaviour as Communication
At the Trauma Informed Practice Conference, in Birmingham in September, Caryn Onions presented the achievements and approach of The Mulberry Bush, a therapeutic residential school for children who are severely traumatised, in Oxford. I was very impressed by what they are accomplishing at the Mulberry Bush, and I was particularly struck by their approach to the children’s challenging behaviour.
Continue reading “Behaviour as Communication”Next Best: Imitation Families
It is very rare, only a very small percentage of children without parental care, but it does sometimes happen that it is not possible to find a place for a child with their extended family, nor in a foster family and the situation is not such that an adoptive family would be appropriate. Usually these children are older, often teenagers, and have complicated challenging behaviour that is difficult to deal with in a family. Or they are children with complex, severe multiple special needs.
What to do with these children? Should they go into an institution? I presume that by now you can predict that the answer here is ‘no’. In this blog we will look at what then.
Continue reading “Next Best: Imitation Families”If Not Extended Family, Then Foster Family
Despite the impression created by the huge numbers of children in institutions and other types of formal alternative care around the world, by far the majority of children not cared for by their parents, are not in formal alternative care. Most of them are already taken in by their extended families, right at this moment, without any additional awareness raising or support. This is something worth building on.
However, just like there are some children who will not be able to be cared for by their parents, no matter how much support they receive and how great the community services available are, there will also be children who do not have extended family members able to take them in and care for them. For them other family-based solutions need to be found.
Continue reading “If Not Extended Family, Then Foster Family”