Creating a Family Adoption & Foster Care Education

How can we parent our children who have experienced trauma? How can we discipline them in a way that will help them learn and grow? In this course, we interview Karen Doyle Buckwalter, a clinical social worker specializing in attachment and trauma, and author of Raising the Challenging Child: How to Minimize Meltdowns, Reduce Conflict, and Increase Cooperation.

This course covers the following topics:

Impact of Trauma

• What is trauma? 
• Trauma vs PTSD
• How does trauma impact a child?
• Three levels of the brain and how children react from a primitive fear base if there is a history of abuse or neglect.
• Does the age of the child, when they experienced trauma or the type of trauma, affect the degree to which the child will be impacted?
• If a child is able to leave the abusive situation, it can lower the impact of PTSD.
• Impact of preverbal trauma- before the child has language and memory.

How to Best Parent a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

• What is a typical behavior for a child who has experienced trauma?
• Internal working model formed with earliest caregivers that forms a template for future relationships with caregivers.
• Children are terrified of being forgotten.
• The children often “reject you before you can reject them.” This helps protect them from their core fear of rejection and is a primitive survival mechanism.
• Importance of awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities and insecurities that may be triggered by caring for children with history of trauma.
• How to help our kids heal and attach? Tips and Techniques.

How to Discipline a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

• Connection before corrections. 
• Build up your relationship account.
• Provide choices.
• Provide a balance of structure and nurture.
• The need for co-regulation with a safe adult rather than time out or other typical approaches.
• These things take time to change. What fires together in the brain wires together so just because the child is safe now does not remove these well-worn neuropathways.

*This course includes a 1-hour conversational audio lesson, a 10-question quiz, and a certificate of completion with the successful completion of the quiz at 80%. 

Your course will remain active for 180 days from purchase date.