Certificate Program in Adoption
This certificate program addresses many of the issues involved in the adoption process and focuses on how the clinician can skillfully help adoptive families. Workshops offered in this certificate program are designed as clinical workshops.
Certificates of completion will be offered after each workshop and a final certificate will be awarded when all requirements have been met. Participants not seeking the full certificate program are welcome to take individual workshops.
To receive the Certificate in Adoption, a participant attends:
7 Required Workshops
2 Elective Workshops
9 Days in Total
Required Workshops
The Psychology of Adoption
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Contemporary Trends in Adoption
- Psychological benefits and risks associated with adoption
- Stress and coping models in adoption
- Family life cycle tasks in adoption
- Implications for post-adoption services
Conceptualizing Crisis Intervention when Working with Adoptive Families
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Presents the therapeutic nuances critical to helping adoptive families work through crisis
- Utilizes Roberts’ Seven-Stage Model of Crisis Intervention as the framework for presenting adoption specific information
- Addresses the relationship between crisis intervention, adoption and trauma
- Offers a preliminary understanding and skill building of attachment specific therapy techniques.
Life Cycle Experience and Issues in the Adoption of Older Children
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Life in the child welfare system/ common survival behaviors
- Adoption as the permanency plan
- Developmental tasks of middle childhood
- Interplay between adoption and child development
- Characteristics of successful adoptive families
Attachment-Focused Therapy for Adoptive Families
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Recognizing the symptoms of impaired attachment
- Impact of impaired attachment on the adoptive family
- Facilitating family attachment
- Assessment/treatment/clinical strategies
Family-Focused Therapy for Post Institutionalized Adopted Children
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Behavioral symptoms common to post-institutionalized children
- Impact on the adoptive family
- The adoptive family as the primary source of care and healing
- Assessment/treatment/clinical strategies
Strategies for Managing Behaviors in Adoptive Families (former Behavior Management and Discipline with Adopted Children)
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Discipline as protection and care
- Supervision as a form of discipline
- Testing, limit-setting, rewards, consequences incentives, punishment
- Skill building for adoptive parents
- Crisis intervention
The Impact of Adverse Early Childhood Experiences: on Development: Implications for Adoption
5 CE Hours, Clinical
- Identification of at-risk children
- Consequences of suboptimal care, deprivation and trauma
- The role of early influences on brain development
- How to access appropriate evaluations and services
Two electives are required in addition to the required workshops. Some examples:
- Adoption Constellation: Skill set for first/birth families
- Clinical and Normative Issues within Adult Adoptee Populations
- Kinship Adoption
- Preparing Adoptive Families to Support LGBTQI Youth
- Trauma Informed Response when working with Adoptive Families
- Living as a Multicultural Family: An Adoptive Family perspective
- Ethics in Adoption: A Practice Perspective
- Understanding and Responding to Children Who Have Sexual Behavior Problems