Articles
Healing from Trauma/Neglect/Abuse
How to Build Your Family’s Resilience
We all want the children we love to be able to face hard times and cope with them successfully. The ability to “bounce back” from life’s challenges can be part of a child’s naturally wired temperament. However, other kids may need help learning how to develop their...
Easing A Child’s Fears When You Meet for the First Time
Typically, when you welcome a child to your home to support their family through a challenging season, you already have a relationship with the child. You may not know them well, but you are not wholly unfamiliar with each other. However, occasionally, raising another...
Maintaining Sibling Connections
Siblings get separated for many reasons when they must leave their parents to live with a family member. While most professionals recommend that siblings stay together if they cannot live at home, separation still happens. How can you support your grandchildren’s...
Impacts of Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol and Drugs
5 Practical Tips to Help a Child Learn Organizational Skills
A child who had prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol or struggles with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often struggles to get and stay organized. You probably feel like there is too much chaos getting them out the door to school every morning. That...
Explaining Prenatal Alcohol or Drug Exposure to Your Grandchild
Are you raising a grandchild (or niece or cousin) whom you suspect was prenatally exposed to alcohol or drugs? Do they have a confirmed diagnosis? You may wonder when and how to explain prenatal exposure to them. Avoiding the topic can lead to shame, confusion, and...
Prenatal Exposure: Myths vs. Facts
When you are raising a family member’s child, you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of information – including faulty information - you hear about prenatal substance exposure. To be sure, it’s a steep learning curve to understand the impacts of alcohol on a...
Challenging Behaviors
Maintaining Your Connection While Helping a Child Learn How to Manage Anger
Anger is a normal human emotion, but it can be scary for many of us to express or manage. When a child grows up with unsafe expressions of anger, or when they are no taught appropriate ways to work through their angry feelings, they may bubble over and act out anger...
Staying Calm to Help a Child Regain Their Calm
When your grandchild or nephew spirals out of control or has a temper tantrum, it's easy to lose your cool and join the chaos, isn't it? After all, as Dr. Bruce Perry frequently says, "dysregulation is contagious!" So how can you stay calm, share your sense of calm,...
Is My Grandchild Too Affectionate with Strangers?
Many young children feel free and safe to approach strangers with smiles and waves. They have not yet processed the "stranger danger" conversations that parents and caregivers will dole out over the coming years. They are curious, innocent, and trusting. But what do...
ADHD
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Disrupting Birth Order
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Helping A Child Heal from Sexual Abuse
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School Issues for Foster & Kinship Kids
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Technology/Internet and Our Kids
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Self-Care for Kinship and Foster Parents
Self-Care Is Not Selfish
Welcoming a loved one’s child into our homes is a gracious and hospitable act of support and care for their struggling family. However, we often forget that raising someone else’s child – even one related to you – can take an added toll on our hearts, minds, and...
Planning for Self-Care that You Can Maintain
As you learn more about how loss and grief impact your grandchildren (or nieces and nephews), hopefully, you are also learning the importance of taking care of yourself. When stepping in to care for vulnerable kids or family members in crisis, you may also be feeling...
4 Quick Tips for Protecting Your Marriage or Partnership
Marriage or life partnership is hard work. Balancing your needs as an individual with the needs of your relationship requires attention to your schedules and developing habits to carve out the time to nurture this connection. When raising a grandchild, niece, or...
Relationship with Child’s Parent
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Working Together For the Good of the Child In Your Care
Tips for Surviving Summer Break with Your Grandkids
School’s out for summer for most kids in this part of the country. You might have plans for a family trip, a staycation, or day trips to the local sites with your grandchildren. Those events are exciting to look forward to and create opportunities for memory-making....
Making a Smooth Transition When You Welcome a Relative’s Child
Successfully welcoming a grandchild or other relative’s child to your home for kinship care requires some preparation and ongoing support. If you’re raising a relative’s child right now, or if you know a child is joining your home soon, these tips can help make that...
The 5 Be’s of Welcoming an Older Child to Your Home
When welcoming an older child to your home, it can be challenging to strike a balance. You don’t want to come on too strong and overwhelm them. You also don’t want to be too relaxed or laid back because you want them to feel welcome and safe. You can do several things...
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This website was supported with funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families’ Children’s Bureau through the Improving Child Welfare Through Investing in Family grant #HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921. The purpose of this grant is to provide an array of kinship preparation services and ongoing kinship supports, and provide shared parenting to build trusting relationships between all out-of-home caregivers and parents of children/youth in foster care to ensure parents and families remain actively involved in normal child-rearing activities.
This website is supported by Grant Number 90CW1149 (HHS-2021-ACF-ACYF-CW-1921) from the Children’s Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Neither the Administration for Children and Families nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse this website (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided). The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Administration for Children and Families and the Children’s Bureau.