Adoption Commitment through the Eyes of Adolescents: Follow the Love Approach!

This webinar offers child welfare professionals, caregivers, and parents of foster/adoptive children, youth, and adolescents an interactive training and discussion. The webinar includes current data regarding teens in the U.S. foster care system, plus a discussion of how emancipation data improves when just one adult commits to a child’s well-being and permanent future. We consider the importance of how child welfare is shifting perceived outcomes and how we can best benefit adolescents through more efficient and specific permanency recruitment - using connection strategies that work.

This webinar training covers the following topics:

1. Tips on how we can help youth move past resistance for an adoption plan.

2. “Impermanence Has Implications” - Why being more efficient in recruitment is more practical. Effective collaboration of youth and agency relationship is part of the plan.

3. “Follow the Love Approach” - How to find the adult relationships needed to change a youth's trajectory. Identifying the skills and competencies needed from adults who are permanency options. The “Follow The Love” theme that Pat O’Brien teaches will be detailed.

4. Birth family outcomes. Working with birth parents. Honoring the need for knowledge and identity formation.

5. Improving outcomes for our LGBTQ youth and teens of diverse culture, race, and/or ethnicity.

6. The importance of becoming a teen behavioral detective. Reviewing the general developmental and mental health of this population.

7. Teaching our adolescent youth to practice self-care in a digital world, and why it is more important now than ever.

8. The specific strains that the current COVID-19 pandemic has caused.

(February 2021)