PARENT GROUPS

Ongoing Parent Training

The training for foster and fost-adopt parents is a specialized, comprehensive ongoing educational process. Each foster parent must be involved in at least 12 hours of training every year. Educators include TLC staff, community experts and other professionals. In the process, parents learn from each other and benefit from sharing experiences. Examples of topics covered include:

Adoption and Foster Care Support Groups

The TLC Adoption and Foster Care Support Groups have been a safe place for foster care and adoptive families to come together and share the trials and tribulations of caring for foster children. Since 2006, the support group offers a place for foster parents to come and discuss critical issues and provide support to each other for the hard, yet rewarding work of caring for a special needs child. Foster and adoptive parents have unique parenting experiences that can benefit other families going through this complicated process. Their knowledge and enthusiasm for their foster and adoption experience is invaluable.

The foster care support group discusses an assortment of issues related to foster children. These topics may include:

• Child attachment
• Dealing with or without birth parents
• Advocating for educational resources
• Responses to questions posed from the "outside world"
• Strategies to support children who feel "different"
• Appropriate discipline techniques
• Medical intervention
• Ethnic diversity in the home and community
• Types of parenting, and much more.

We laugh, cry, and share our lives with others.

Through play, the children who come with their parents receive support and understanding from their peers. They learn that they are not alone nor are they "different".