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Category: Family

The Good Enough Parent

Sheena Abrams July 19, 2022 No Comments

Do you ever feel like a terrible parent? Do you have moments when you lost your patience or “blew up” that you look back on with shame and guilt and think, “I’m totally messing my kid up!”? You are not alone. Parenting is hard and, as fully-human beings, none of us do it perfectly. We all make mistakes. Perfection Not Needed I have good news for you! You don’t have to be a perfect parent; you just need to be a GOOD ENOUGH parent. Being a good enough parent rather than the perfect parent is actually better for your child.

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The Loss in Disability

Kaitlin Jeter July 12, 2022 No Comments

Disability is something that most people don’t think will happen in their life.  Still, the disability community is the largest minority in society today with one in four individuals born with or acquiring a disability at some point over their lifetime. With this commonality comes a shared difficult experience of coping with disability, which is often unexpected. There is a unique grief and loss which accompanies disability that is difficult for others outside the experience to understand. This experience is called “ambiguous loss.”  My Story At twenty-three my mind was as far from disability as it could possibly be. I was young, healthy, and enjoying

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Raising Them to Leave Us Fostering Resilience  Pt. 2

Dezeree Martinez, LPC July 5, 2022 No Comments

Fostering resilience in teens can be scary for us as parents as we learned in Part 1 of this blog post. By providing them with the appropriate supports, we are helping them to launch successfully into adulthood. Early development of resilience. The fundamentals of resiliency start in infancy and continue on into early childhood. During this period, little ones are completely reliant on their primary attachment figure, be it a parent or other caregiver, to meet their every need. Through this bond they learn to trust and that they are worthy of having their needs met. Lots of nurturing and lots of

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Raising Them to Leave Us: Fostering Resilience

Dezeree Martinez, LPC June 29, 2022 No Comments

As a parent, our primary job is to protect our kids. It sounds simple, right? Well, that’s what I thought when I became a mother to a bouncing baby boy. You see, I didn’t have the greatest beginning to life so decided I was going to use my experience to my advantage. I thought to myself, I truly know about the awful things that my fellow parent-friends didn’t know so I was going to be able to spot every red flag before there’s even a hint of danger and my kids would be so much better off for it. I was

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Parenting A Child With Trauma

Kashmir Frank, LMFT May 12, 2022 No Comments

            As a parent it can be really difficult figuring out how to help your child or teen who has experienced some type of trauma.  We can’t take their pain away.  Or make them forget their pain.  We can’t ignore that it happened.  So how do we help them?  What do we do to make it better?  How do we fix it??? How to Support Their Journey to Healing            HA, that’s the golden question!  And the simple answer is…we can’t.  I think when we finally come to that realization, it makes helping our kiddos and teens navigate through their trauma

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How Fostering Challenged My Relationships

Amanda Tallman May 6, 2022 No Comments

There are many relationships that happen through being a foster parent. If I had to name them all, it would probably take up most of this blog. Then there are relationships with friends and family that were there before we became foster parents. When I became a foster parent in 2016, I heard about all the challenges with behaviors and all the challenges I would face in relation to the child coming into my home, but what I did not realize is the challenges it would add to my own relationships. Relationship with significant other It was about 6 months

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Helping Children Navigate Emotions

Kashmir Frank, LMFT March 17, 2022 No Comments

Do you remember your parents talking to you about how to feel anger, sadness, or any emotion at that?  A common answer I get from clients is “no”. I can definitely say I don’t remember anyone in my family telling me how to feel or express any type of emotion.  This is very common.  I feel society has engrained in us that there is no need to teach our kiddos how to show and feel emotion.  I’ve worked with many different cultures and all but one has told me showing emotion is a sign of weakness; yet I also hear

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Managing My Child’s Behaviors Started with Me

Amanda Tallman January 24, 2022 No Comments

In the fall of 2016, my husband and I became licensed foster parents. Everyone told us we would get a nice “honeymoon phase,” before behaviors escalated with the kids who came into our home. I was caught off guard when we did not experience the “honeymoon phase.” I felt unprepared and overwhelmed. I began to question if I actually knew what I was doing. The information from all the classes I had taken seemed to disappear. “How will we ever get through this?” My husband and I would question. Start with Self Care             Managing behaviors comes with practical skills

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Grateful for the Hard Things

Dr. Crystal Krueger November 24, 2021 No Comments

One of my favorite things to do as an adoptive parent is talk about those taboo topics that we aren’t “allowed” to discuss with the general public, because… well, a lot of people just don’t get it.  How the systems are taxing and the people are exhausting.  Those are the conversation most people understand.  But it becomes uncomfortable when we start talking about the challenges that come along with parenting children who are adopted.  Many people want to paint this picture that adoption is easy.  Can it be rewarding?  Yes.  Is it easy? No.  It’s Hard And it’s hard.  It

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