Target Audience: resource caregivers

In this training, you'll learn the impact fostering or adopting can have on family dynamics, including the impact on marital relationships, biological children, foster or adoptive children already living in the home, and extended family members. This training helps caregivers who are fostering or adopting gain insight and increased understanding of how their family may need to adjust, as well as strategies that they can use to support healthy family dynamics.

Target Audience: resource caregivers

This training will help adoptive parents understand the importance of having ongoing conversations with their children about their birth and adoption story. The modules show how empowering children/youth with the missing pieces of their story can help them build trust in family relationships, help with healthy identity formation, and can lead to stronger connections with birth family members. You'll learn how to have ongoing conversations with your children/youth about their life story that are done in an inclusive, open fashion.

Target Audience: resource caregivers

In this training, you will receive an overview of the common skills that youth will need to effectively navigate as an adult and provide strategies on how families who are fostering or adopting can prepare youth to successfully transition into adulthood. The training highlights the variance that can exist between chronological and developmental age for children/youth who have experienced trauma, separation, and loss and how this can impact the transition to adulthood. Some of the challenges that youth may face during this transition are highlighted.

Target Audience: resource caregivers

This training helps caregivers understand some of the difficulties that children/youth who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss can have in regulating themselves. This training reviews the different phases of crisis and provides caregivers who are fostering or adopting with strategies to proactively prevent a crisis from occurring. You'll learn ways to keep children/youth safe when they are having a crisis and strategies that can help to de-escalate the situation.

Target Audience: resource caregivers

This training provides an overview of healthy sexual development and how to talk to children/youth about healthy sexual development and relationships. The training addresses some of the needs that children/youth who have experienced trauma, loss, or separation may have in developing a positive, healthy identity relative to their sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (SOGIE), and sexuality. The training also highlights strategies that caregivers who are fostering or adopting can use in supporting the child’s/youth's sexual development.

Target Audience: child welfare professionals

Module 1 provides an overview of the National Adoption Competency Mental Health Training for Child Welfare Professionals and makes the case for the need for adoption competency. Lessons in this module orient participants to the training and training objectives, highlight the guiding principles that provide the foundation for work with children and families from an adoption or guardianship lens, provide context for the changes in adoption and guardianship options and practice today, and emphasize the urgent need for permanency for children and youth and the negative consequences of impermanence.

Target Audience: hotline workers, hotline supervisors, child welfare caseworkers and supervisors, medical providers, treatment providers, mental health providers

The birth of a new baby is a joyous occasion—but it is also a critical time for infants who are affected by prenatal substance exposure and for their caregivers. Plans of Safe Care is an interactive learning experience for hospital mandatory reporters and screeners who are vital to the creation of plans of safe care with these families.

Human trafficking is on the rise in the United States, and you—the child welfare workforce—are uniquely positioned to recognize and respond to children and youth who might be experiencing trafficking. This self-guided Web-based training will increase your awareness of indicators of labor and sex trafficking, highlight risk factors that statistically make a child or youth more vulnerable to traffickers, support you in screening for trafficking, and empower you to respond with sensitivity to disclosures.

Target Audience: caseworkers, supervisors

What happens in a family when domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health issues meet? These intersecting issues produce some of most challenging cases that we work with in child welfare. In this interactive learning experience, you’ll apply the Safe & Together model—an internationally recognized approach to responding to domestic violence when children are involved—to these complex situations.