Continuing Education Workshop Description

"Woke." "White Christian Nationalism." "Racism."

These ideas are impacting foster care, adoption, and child and family therapy practices. How do we provide ethical, empathic, client-centered care while also acknowledging systemic inequities, the developmental consequences of early trauma, and our broader social responsibility?

This six-hour continuing education workshop invites participants to wrestle with these questions. Co-taught by Angela Tucker and Deborah Gray, the workshop explores the complex intersections of foster care placement, adoptee identity, transracial adoption, race, attachment, grief, trauma, and belonging.

Participants will examine how adoption shapes identity across the lifespan through the Adoptee Consciousness Model, while also exploring racial identity development, code-switching, the historical and contemporary influence of White Christian Nationalism on child welfare, and the ethical challenges facing today's therapists and social workers.

Together, participants will consider the developmental impacts of neglect, attachment disruption, and early trauma alongside current child welfare policies, asking difficult questions about justice, equity, and best practice.

The workshop challenges professionals to recognize overt and implicit discrimination, thoughtfully navigate differences in political and religious worldviews, and strengthen their abilities to provide culturally responsive care to adoptees and families who have been involved in child welfare.

Using a combination of presentation, facilitated discussion, video analysis, self-reflection, and role-play, participants will leave with practical tools for working with clients involved in child welfare, adoptees, and their families in this sociopolitical climate.

Therapists and social workers will recognize and counter their countertransference issues without derailing the helping relationship. Workshop attendees will develop skills for greater cultural humility, ethical awareness, and clinical confidence.

Continuing Education Workshop Objectives

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Analyze the unique identity challenges experienced by transracial foster children and adoptees, including racial identity development, code-switching, belonging, and navigating multiple cultural worlds.
2. Summarize the historical and contemporary influence of race, White Christian Nationalism, and systemic power on child welfare and adoption practices in the United States.
3. Identify the effects of "color-blind" parenting on attachment when children of color are raised in white families. Describe strategies that promote secure parent-child attachment through caregiver education and increased racial awareness.
4. Demonstrate adoptee-centered communication strategies that promote identity exploration, validate lived experience, and support healthy racial and adoptee identity development.
5. Identify four developmental impacts of early neglect and trauma exposure and explain how these experiences influence children's emotional, relational, and neurological development.
6. Apply appropriate boundaries around self-disclosure when working with families whose political or religious beliefs differ from their own, while avoiding false consensus in helping relationships.
7. Recognize signs of countertransference, identify situations in which it may interfere with effective practice, and describe strategies for maintaining regulation and therapeutic effectiveness.