All Day Training

This year's all-day training featured Heather Forbes and Dawn Wadiak from the Beyond Consequences Institute. The topic of the day was love-based techniques designed to help children with severe behaviors and diagnoses, such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

This event was held on June 1st and started in the early morning at The Kirkley Hotel in Lynchburg. Birth parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, care providers and social work professionals traveled from all over Virginia (and even from as far away as Ohio) to attend the event. In all, 210 people attended the training, of whom 128 were associated with DePaul Family Services.

"The most important point throughout the training was the importance of not allowing the child's behavior to interfere with the relationship between parent and child." said TFC Social Work Supervisor April Estrada when asked about this training. "The training reiterated the importance of the relationship between the child and the parent" she added.

She also thought that the training was very "hands-on" and gave foster parents excellent visual information, which would make it easier for them to put the intervention techniques into practice in their homes.

This topic was important to people in the audience. Patricia Ronk, TFC Social Work Supervisor from Roanoke said "I had at least two social workers in my branch say they now understood my passion for this topic, and that if they could, they would like to obtain Ph.D's. in attachment theory, because they see how absolutely important it is to our field."

The Caring Chronicle staff spoke to Pam Mitchell, one of the many DePaul foster parents who attended this all day training. She had a lot of interesting things to say including, "I am implementing some of the strategies that were presented. I have found that many of them do work. I have many of them already in place with our children, but it was like a missing puzzle piece fell from the sky when I learned that an abused, neglected child's brain is not normal." According to the training, not only is the abused, neglected child's mental outlook different but the actual appearance of the brain is smaller and deformed when compared to a well adjusted brain.

Ruby Penn, another foster parent from our agency, had also implemented concepts that were covered. "Instead of sending my children to their rooms for a time-out, I have them come sit with me and we discuss their feelings and actions. I believe it gives all involved a better understanding of what is going on at the time."

Heather Forbes and Dawn Wadiak's training session was truly an all day training as it lasted from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. Due to time restrictions, some participants had to leave early, but many stayed. Knowledge is never a heavy burden and the better understanding foster parents have of how their children function, the more likely they are to succeed.

By Jonas Vesterlund, Assistant Database Administrator