course »What Mixed-Race Adoptive Families Need from Helping Professionals

Date: 4/8/2022, 3:00 pm—4:30 pm
County: -Training Offerings
Location: DISTANCE LEARNING
Sponsor: WestCoast Children’s Clinic
Phone: 510-269-9030
In this country, talking about race is never easy. PACT 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 parents along with children, in order to support healthy, race-identity affirming parenting approaches that support white parents (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. This training will describe Pact’s three-step approach to helping parents understand what their children need from them to become healthy adults of color. Providers who specialize in working with communities of color must understand how to support racial identity issues that surface within adoptive families, as this will help strengthen the bonds within families.