Purpose

The Post Graduate Certificate Program in Adoption Therapy provides non-credit bearing advanced education and training for mental health professionals, particularly those working to promote adoption from public foster care, in specialized theories and practices for working with all members of the adoptive triad, including birth mothers and fathers; adoptive mothers and fathers; and the adopted person. The continuum of care from foster care to kinship, guardianship or adoption is an important foundation of understanding necessary to be competent in working with families and children in the world of adoption. All of these family constructions will be discussion and included in the program.

Using lecture, videos, classroom discussion, panel presentations, and guest lectures from adoption professionals (including representatives of each of the adoption triad members), this ten-month program is designed to help therapists develop the clinical sensitivity, and more important, competency needed to treat the mental health problems of children who come from a background of abuse and neglect and who are being raised in a family other than the birth family. The course emphasizes the development of a framework of understanding about the complexity of being a child or adult in a family by adoption and the therapeutic skills that will enable practitioners to work at the individual, couples, group, and family levels of clinical practice. Woven into each class is the impact that trauma, separation and loss-- as well as multiple moves --can have on children's development and well-being.

Background

Adoption is an event that has a life-long effect on everyone involved. Adoption brings unique rewards as well as challenges to families and children, and to those who are affected in the extended family by adoption. Sometimes families will need help as concerns or difficulties in living arise. Timely intervention by a professional skilled and trained in adoption issues can often prevent issues common to adoption from becoming more serious problems that might be more difficult to resolve.

Children and youth adopted from the public child welfare system bring additional complexity to the mix with histories of abuse, medical and behavioral problems and often they can have difficulties with issues of loss, attachment, grief, and identity formation as well as adjustment and attachment disorders. These unique developmental needs frequently place additional stress on the family system, especially when they are manifested as challenging behaviors and or clinical disorders.

Adoptive parents often report that counselors/therapists and other professionals are lacking in the basic understanding and skills necessary to address the issues particular to members of the adoption triad - which includes: birth parents, adopted parents, and the adopted person. Professionals can lack skills to deal with foster families, kinship care families and families designated as guardians for children. A therapist working with this population must have some familiarity and experience with, not only, foster care, kinship, guardianship and adoption both pre and post, but also with trauma, learning disabilities, and an array of mental health issues that may be part of the child's challenge or part of the parents' challenge. Therapeutic support service providers need to consider everyone affected by adoption, not just the adopted person, and consider as well what supports need to be on-going since adoption is a lifelong process. These issues can be recurrent, increasing the demand for ongoing and adoption competent therapists.

Finding the right adoption competent therapist can be a daunting task, especially when parents may feel overwhelmed or burdened by the situation or in a crisis. This course is aimed at creating and certifying adoption competent practitioners to support families created through adoption (and we focus not only on legal adoption, but also the emotional adoptions found in kinship care placements, longer term fostering situations and families by guardianship. The course aims to train, certify and create a pool of practitioners who are knowledgeable about adoption (for all members of the adoption triad) and who are experienced about working with members of the adoption triad and the extended family that is created in adoption. In essence, we are about certifying clinicians who understand post permanency issues and speak “adoption”. Our goal is to create, not only certified practitioners, but eventually to develop trainers who can extend the certification program and skilled and certified supervisors for ongoing support while working with these challenging family systems.

For these reasons, the New York State Office of Children and Families, the Hunter College School of School of Social Work, the Center for Family Connections are offering this Postgraduate Certificate Program in Adoption Therapy.

Each session will cover a specific subject relevant to the emotional and behavioral needs of adopted children, youth and affected families.

The specialization creates the opportunity to expand overall social policy knowledge and analytic skills through an in-depth examination of the needs of children, youth, and families or the dynamics of the child welfare policy arena; to identify and assess a range of analytical and ideological, frameworks, to identify and use specialized knowledge for policy, research and program development; and to develop a more sophisticated understanding of diversity, oppression and the processes of social change. Students advance their capacity to understand, analyze, and modify social policies and services develop specialized policy knowledge related to their long-term professional interests and goals; and learn to generalize what they have learned to other issues and population.