Foster Care Training

“In this country, talking about race is not easy, but can be especially challenging cross-culturally between caregivers and youth. But we can help caregivers and adoptive parents get more comfortable with practice. Beth Hall has written extensively about how to talk with your children about race and racism; there are steps professionals can take that will help parents and children feel better prepared to have these difficult conversations—and to have them frequently. Because that’s what BIPOC children need and what the state of our society demands. When working with youth populations, professionals must educate caregivers along with children, in order to support healthy, race-identity affirming parenting approaches that support white caregivers (and others parenting transracially) in understanding that the children of color they have adopted have different needs that must be addressed and talked about in order to support healthy identity formation. This workshop will review the typical developmental milestones for transracial adoptive parents after placement and explore specific suggestions about how to help parents move from a “color-blind” to a “color-affirming” approach. Beth will describe PACT’s three-step approach to helping parents understand what their children need from them to become healthy adults of color. For those working with children who are adopted across racial lines, we must think about how to instill in them and their parents not just the horror of racism but the beauty, creativity, resilience, and resistance of their racial heritage. Finally, this training will review some of the developmentally important lessons we share with children and caregivers, as a means of leaning into the challenges and success of transracial adoptions. By very young ages, children are thinking a lot about fairness. This makes them natural social justice advocates, which is something you can model and nurture. No matter the child’s race, parents and supportive adults must learn how to talk with them about all “-isms,” including anti-Black and Brown racism and the history of white supremacy and involve them in an analysis about the systems they inhabit, including their school, neighborhood, and faith community and the racial bias that lives within those and all institutions.”