LIVE WEBINAR: Navigating the Teen Years as an Adoptive Parent: Part 1

Event by Wisconsin Adoption & Permanency Support

The three webinars together will describe: 1) how adolescence is a time of push-pull, in demanding independence then resuming rituals of childhood, in exploring identity apart from family and also rigidly seeking to conform. 2) adopted adolescents face all this with the complication of also rethinking the impact of their adopted status on self and on being a member of your family. This three -part webinar highlights classic developmental dynamics, joys and struggles of parenting a teen, with a specific eye to what strategies aid you an adoptive parent. Multiple practical ideas will be offered in order to keep holding your relationship with your teens as they test and cling, sometimes to extreme levels. Case examples will illustrate how others lived through this dramatic time of life and demonstrate use of strategies. Participants will have time to reflect on their own evolving job description as a parent raising a child with early relational ruptures now facing adulthood, in order to approach this time of life with humor, compassion and grace.

The next two parts of this series will be:
Part Two, June 16th – Strategies for Staying a “Safe Haven Parent” as Your Adopted Teen Tests your Rules and Relationship
Part Three, July 21st – Launching your older Teen who is both so Ready and Not at All: Strategies, Resources, Grief Emotions, and Re-formatting your Parent Job Description.

Presenter Bio: Krista Nelson, LICSW, LMFT has thirty years of post-master’s experience working with children and parents who are coping with attachment loss, trauma and family changes, especially with youth who entered a family through adoption. She is co-founder of Family Circle Counseling in St. Paul, MN and led the Wilder Foundation’s Attachment and Trauma Training program in St. Paul from 2001 to 2017. She co-created Surviving and Thriving Beyond the RAD Diagnosis in 2008 and continues to facilitate adoptive parents workshops across Minnesota. Krista is an attachment focused family therapist with advanced training in EMDR, Theraplay, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Emotion Focused Couples Therapy who loves the balance of doing therapy with playful children, teens, adult adoptees, parents and couples in their quest for healing. She specializes today in teen-parent family therapy and in therapy with adult adoptees and adoptive parents addressing their own trauma histories.