The term “trauma-informed” is common terminology around the foster care and adoptive community, but this wasn’t always the case. Trauma-informed care and intervention is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children by addressing the whole child and accounting for the effect traumatic incidents have on a child’s development.
Trauma-informed education and Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI®) picked up awareness in 2005 when Texas Christian University created the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development to advance the work of Dr. Purvis and Dr. Cross. They would later co-write The Connected Child and create a radical new approach to helping vulnerable children heal.
As we all seek to provide the best support to the children in our care, implementing trauma-informed principles in your parenting is one of the best ways to care for children from hard places in a holistic way. This approach helps us shift our perspectives when a child misbehaves, and gives us practical tools to become a child’s biggest supporter, start important conversations, and partner with them in their growth and development.
Many people are new to the foster care community or may not be aware of trauma-informed care. And even those of us who are familiar with these principles can benefit from regularly getting a refresher on how to utilize them. Due to the benefits of hearing others live out these principles, we wanted to put together a list of valuable conversations from The Forgotten Podcast to help you learn about trauma-informed care for the first time or refresh your existing knowledge.
Here are 10 resources that will help you understand trauma-informed care:
Episode 66: Traditional Parenting Vs. Trauma-Informed Parenting: Pursuing Connection with Your Child
Many of the children in our care have experienced years of trauma and our first job is to get them back to a place of regulation. Understanding how to best love, teach, and correct our children is something we are continually learning. Kristin Berry brings practical insight and encouragement to help us parent the children in our care in a way that keeps us connected.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 201: Practical Support for Parenting Children from Hard Places (w/ Kayla Moffitt)
Kayla Moffitt went from zero to five children through foster care the same week her dad passed away from COVID-19. The children were siblings living separately in foster care for the majority of their time in care. Kayla and her husband, Jerad, eventually adopted all of them, many of whom have received psychiatric diagnoses like Bipolar Disorder, RAD, Childhood Schizophrenia, and more.
After struggling to navigate the hard moments of parenting and how to support challenging behaviors and actions, Kayla became a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) Practitioner, which she says truly “saved our family.” In this episode, we dive into various trauma-informed parenting tactics and hope for those who are parenting children from hard places.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 25: Trauma: How You Can Help Your Child and Family Survive
We recently had a guest on the podcast tell us, “I share Episode 25 with every person I know because it’s such a helpful overview of trauma-informed care!”
Because caring for the orphan is a deep concern on God’s heart, Jenn Hook wanted to provide support for these families and help them feel loved and cared for. She founded Replanted Ministry to create a community where both the parents/foster parents could feel safe and be able to share their honest feelings and emotions without judgment. This episode helps us understand the abuse cycle, attachment and sensory processing problems, and important coping skills.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 239: Trauma-Informed Sleep Principles (w/ Allison Ezell)
Whether a child has experienced foster care or adoption, there is history and trauma to navigate. As you can imagine, this can spill over into eating habits, behavior issues, and affect children’s sleep. Many foster parents and caregivers experience the difficulty of seeking help from someone trained in both foster/adoptive backgrounds and sleep practices.
In this episode, you’ll learn how isolating dealing with sleep issues in children who have experienced trauma can be, the importance of setting realistic expectations based on a child’s history and biology, navigating bedtime with multiple children, and so much more.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 116: Understanding Food Trauma & Food Insecurity
This episode is about a topic that’s actually quite common but doesn’t often get talked about: food trauma. A food insecurity can occur when you don’t have access to enough food or the right, healthy options. Many children develop trauma around food if it was ever used as a punishment or withheld, but a negative relationship with food can also occur if you were unsure whether or not you would go hungry.
Christa Jordan is an adoptive mom, a writer, and passionate about natural health. Her background is in social work and she cares deeply about equipping and encouraging others to build positive relationships with food to overcome trauma and insecurity.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 123: Trauma-Informed Parenting: Building Connections With Your Child
Does your child ever just get on your last nerve? Have you had a meltdown of your own after a really hard day? Does it feel like your parenting techniques that have worked with other kids in your care just aren’t working anymore? As parents, we’ve all experienced this more times than we would care to count. When our kids have significant trauma in their past, and we have our own triggers from our past, it can make for a challenging journey.
Ryan and Kayla North know firsthand what that is like! They have 10 years under their belt as foster parents and today they have developed training and programs on childhood trauma. In this episode they share perspective shifts we need when raising kids with traumatic backgrounds, how our own childhood trauma may be impacting our relationship with our kids, practical ways to parent with connection as the primary goal, why we can’t care for our children if we’re not caring for ourselves, and so much more.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 190: Uncovering the Importance of Trauma-Informed Parenting (w/ Kara Higgins)
In 2009, trauma-informed care wasn’t discussed as much as it is today and many families were not as open about the hardships that came along with an adoption. Kara Higgins always knew she wanted to grow her family by adoption, and later had the opportunity to do so when adoptions opened up in Rwanda. That’s when she came face-to-face with trauma at a time when very few realized what it meant.
In this episode, Kara shares openly about her journey to understanding trauma-informed care, how her expectations of adoption matched up to reality, when she discovered that trauma isn’t just for foster children, and why connection makes all the difference in the world.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 169: Talking About the Tough Topics in Foster Care (w/ Jenn Hook)
Jenn Hook returns to the podcast with a new book that builds on the foundation laid by her first book, Replanted. In her latest book, Thriving Families, Jenn provides resources for navigating the grief children in foster care feel, maintaining relationships with biological parents, preserving the cultural background of a child, and much more.
Jenn has a deep passion for the adoptive and foster care communities. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Replanted—a ministry that helps empower the Church to support adoptive and foster families by providing emotional, tangible, and informational support.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 118: Even in Our Darkest Moments (w/ Annie Marek-Barta)
Each of us has a story – Hard seasons, beautiful seasons, and times where we’ve seen God’s faithfulness. In this episode, we get to share the powerful story of Annie Marek-Barta. Annie grew up in an unsafe home that ultimately led her to decide she would take her own life. Through a series of God-ordained conversations and events, she found hope and healing.
Annie shares her story, what it was like to enter foster care at the age of 17, and the emotional experience of being adopted at 26. (And yes, that’s a thing!) This episode will inspire and remind you of the faithfulness of our God.
LISTEN HERE →
Episode 138: Tending to the Pain of the Past (w/ Sandhya Oaks)
Sandhya Oaks, a Transracial Adoptee, was adopted from India at the age of one. When she turned 18 years old, after years of experiencing trauma, Sandhya was disowned by her adoptive family. As she has intentionally worked on healing from the past of being an orphan for the first year of her life and from the pain her adoptive family brought, Sandhya has learned the importance of addressing the pain of the past and redeeming her perspective of forgiveness. Her story is full of abundant resilience, defiant hope, and a journey of healing.
LISTEN HERE →
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