Supporting Families After They Adopt

What do adoptive families need and want post adoption to help them parent their adoptive families? What post adoption services are available? What can agencies do and where can families find help? Host Dawn Davenport, Executive Director of Creating a Family, the national infertility & adoption education and support nonprofit, interviews: Debra S. Waller, Chief Executive Officer, Jockey International, Inc. and founder of Jockey Being Family Foundation; Rita Soronen, President and CEO of Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption; and Susan Cox, Vice President of Public Policy at Holt International.

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Hit the Highlights

The Need:
- Why do we need post adoption support? What types of adoptive families are most in need of these services?
- The changing face of who is trying to adopt from foster care. We are seeing more people going into foster care adoption because domestic infant adoption are costly and international adoptions are down. Also the needs of internationally adopted kids in many ways mirror the needs of children in foster care. Many of these people are coming from infertility and seem unprepared for the reality of parenting children who have experienced abuse and neglect.
- What type of support do people need or want?
- One of the core missions of Jockey Being Family is to prevent adoption dissolutions. How does post adoption support factor in to this?
- In addition to general support, we believe people need resources. What topics do people need information on? We included this in an informal survey for our audience and extensive online community.
- Who is currently providing this support and resources?
- Where are adoptive families finding support 6 months post-adoption?
Gaps: What do adoptive families say?
Solutions:
- What works?
- We have all these great resources by the top experts in the US to help families. We have a huge thriving support group. How do we best get this info into the hands of parents when they really struggling?
- Who is in the best position?
  - Agency based?
  - Community based?
  - Churches
  - Online
- The need for therapist with specific adoption training.
- Mentoring
- Warmline