All too frequently, the Referral Coordinator at A Home Within receives calls like this one from Sam*. He has aged out of our foster care system and is now homeless and struggling with drug and alcohol use.

Sam:  You told me to call you if anything changed in my situation. I’m having a really hard time right now. I am living out of my car, I’m trying to stop using drugs and have lost my best friend. I know I’m not at bottom yet, but I can see myself getting there and I don’t know where to start. 

A Home Within (AHW):
I’m really glad you called. I’m afraid that right now we still don’t have an available therapist we can match you with.
Let’s see what we can do to get you some support more immediately. Do you currently have a place to sleep?

Photo courtesy of Don Hankins.

Sam:
Yes, I’m alternating between sleeping in my car and at a friend’s. 

AHW:
OK, let’s connect you with some housing resources so you can have more options. Can you describe your current drug and alcohol intake?

Sam: No hard drugs, but I’m drinking a lot and smoking pot. The problem is, every time I do, I feel terrible about it and ashamed that this is how I am getting by. I don’t really have a home to go to, which it makes it harder. I can see myself having some kind of an addiction in the future if I don’t change things. And I’ve been trying. I have. it’s just not working. 

AHW:
OK, what I’m going to do is give you the telephone numbers of some places that specialize in substance use. They may not be long-term services, but can be helpful until we can get you matched with one of our long-term therapists. How does that sound?

Sam:
Do you know how long I’ll have to wait to get a therapist?

AHW: I’m sorry, but at this point I really don’t know. We’ll do the best we can.

Photo courtesy of scribbletaylor.

Sam: OK, thanks. I wouldn’t have known where to go.
Someone gave me your number and said I had to call you. I’m so glad that I know this place exists, now. I can’t do this without help.

Sadly, Sam’s predicament is too common. The unmet mental health needs of foster children and youth are extraordinary. By some estimates only 25% receive treatment. This year we have been able to match 50% of those referred to us. That’s better, but we still have work to do.

*Name has been changed to protect client identity and confidentiality.

By Toni Heineman

The hunger of parentless children is palpable, as a visitor to a Haitian orphanage captured so eloquently in her blog. Unfortunately, we do not have to travel to watch children who live without families beg to be held—both physically and emotionally. Children in our foster care system, who have been separated from parents who are unable to care for them may not live in orphanages, but they may live with many different families—none their own, over many years in foster care.

Some fortunate children find “forever families” through adoption, but many never have the certainty of knowing that, at the end of the day, they will return to the same home they left in the morning and that they will do this day after day and year after year. This kind of uncertainty depletes children’s resources, leaving them emotionally impoverished. Even when in the care of loving foster parents, the abiding knowledge that they could be moved at any moment, leaves them longing for unbroken connections.

Photo courtesy of Szadok.

Like the Haitian orphans who declared their visitors to be “my mommy,” “my daddy,” foster children, in an effort to assuage the gnawing hunger for family, often quickly attach themselves to people they barely know. Paradoxically, these premature attachments leave children even more vulnerable to loss. They fall in love quickly and repeatedly, only to be left again and again by people who are confused and overwhelmed by the intensity of feelings they have aroused in children who hardly know them.

Children simply must have stable relationships with adults who love them in order to thrive. Granted, some children will leave orphanages or foster care, having learned to care for themselves well enough to lead successful and satisfying lives, but they will never entirely leave behind an emotionally impoverished childhood, in the same way that children who have grown up without adequate financial resources will understand poverty with their entire beings—not just as an economic, social, or political concept.

Tomorrow many of us will gather to enjoy food and the companionship of friends and family. It is a time to give thanks that we can satisfy, not only our physical hunger, but the deeper hunger for connections to those we love and care for and who love us in return.
*These are the words of a contributor to Mamapedia describing her visit to an orphanage in Haiti.

By Toni Heineman

It’s been several days since a colleague alerted me to a lawsuit that has been filed in South Carolina by the parents of a child who was adopted from the foster care system. I have been unable to understand how the foster care system could have failed a child so utterly and completely.

According to this report a child who is now eight years old entered foster care at approximately three months of age and remained there until adoption about a year and a half later. Initially, that would seem to be a story with a sad beginning and a happy ending.

However, tragically, those in charge of “M.C.’s” care decided that this child should be raised as a girl, not merely treated as a girl, but made to look like a girl. M. C. had been born with ambiguous genitalia—with both male and female reproductive organs—but at the age of sixteen months, sex-assignment surgery irreversibly altered that and M. C. officially became female. The problem is that M. C. feels like a boy to both himself and his parents, but his body has been permanently disfigured.

Setting aside, for the moment, the prevailing expert opinion that genital surgery should only be undertaken when the child has clearly and consistently identified as male or female, one is still left to wonder what compelled those in charge to inflict needless physical and lasting emotional pain on a child too young to understand what was being done to his body or why. How did this happen? One can only wonder how the decision was made? Who participated? Surely there were multiple people involved. Who had the final authority? Was this a result of “team decision making,” that relies on all of the important people in a foster child’s life to make important decisions?

What makes this all the more baffling is the rush to permanently alter this child’s body when adoption was on the horizon. Would it not have made sense to allow the adoptive parents to determine whether to raise their child as a boy or a girl? And if the parents noticed only a few months after the surgery that M.C.’s behavior and preferences tended more to the masculine, was this not at all evident when he was in foster care?

Those in the foster care system are repeatedly called upon to make very difficult, often life-changing decisions about children in their care. For example, it can take years for a parent to recover from the drug addiction that caused her permanently to lose custody of her child.
Yet, freeing the child for adoption may have seemed like the best or only realistic course of action at the time—and may ultimately have been. In another instance, a decision is made to return a child to his parent’s care only to have him turn up in an emergency room with broken bones following a severe beating. Only in storybooks can we turn back to the decision point and try out a different ending.

Sadly, those in charge took it upon themselves to write a premature ending for M.C. He was not given time to say “no,” or to put words to his feelings about being a boy or a girl or both. The story might have had a happier ending if M. C. had been allowed to be the author of his own life.

By Toni Heineman

Suppose that you are a foster parent with four children in your care. One of the children is excited about going trick-or-treating. One child knows nothing about the holiday. One comes from a family that does not celebrate the holiday for religious reasons. The fourth is a new arrival who is easily frightened and who erupts into panicked screams when her foster sister disappears behind the mask that transforms her into a witch.

You want to create happy memories for all of the children but crafting an event that includes everyone does not seem as simple as one might wish. Is a trip to the Pumpkin Patch a Halloween celebration? Is the scarecrow the family makes for the front yard more frightening than fun? Given all of the difficulties facing foster parents who are trying to bring order and stability into the lives of children who have been removed from their families because of abuse or neglect, these could certainly be seen as a trivial issues. However, for foster parents who understand the importance of ritual in creating a sense of family, matters such as these can loom large.

Photo by: Urbansoup.

Foster parenting is not easy, particularly for those parents who open their homes to several children. Chances are good that they will come from different backgrounds, and bring with them not just different expectations about holidays and whether or how they might be celebrated, but from varying communities. The suburban parent who takes in a child who has lived in a city tenement may discover that the quiet of the new neighborhood is unnerving rather than comforting and interferes with the child’s sleep. The family who bows heads in prayer and spends most of Sunday in church may find themselves with a confused and ill-behaved foster child if this is her first exposure to formal religion.

For foster parents who want children to feel part of the family, it is natural to include them in the family’s traditional holiday celebrations. Yet, paradoxically, rituals that are unfamiliar to the child may make her feel like an outsider, rather than one who belongs. As a result, she may deliberately exclude herself from the festivities or disrupt them by acting out—thereby ensuring that everyone shares in her misery.

Halloween ushers in the fall and winter holidays with parents anticipating a rising tide of activities—some welcome and some not. For foster parents this season often means a rising sense of anxiety, as well, as they attempt to help the children they care for feel at home with them and yet still connected to their families of origin. Foster parents always need community help and support, but particularly at this time of year.

By Toni Heineman

This is the complaint of a foster mother who last month had three-year-old Jesse delivered into her care. Not only will he not sit still, he fidgets while she is trying to read him a story and gets up from the dinner table without asking. He frequently bumps into things when he wanders around the house because he doesn’t watch where he’s going. He has trouble falling asleep and often wakes, crying, during the night.
He squirms when she is trying to dress him. He quickly loses interest in activities. She is beside herself because he just doesn’t seem to pay attention to her. She tells the caseworker that she thinks he should have medication for
ADHD to help him calm down.

Jesse was placed into foster care when he was found roaming the halls of a residential hotel. His mother had left him with a couple that had recently moved into the hotel, saying that she would pick him up later that day. Two days later, she still had not returned.

This is Jesse’s third foster home in the last year. He has been removed from the two previous homes because the foster parents were unable to manage his behavior. If, as is likely, his caseworker is beginning to panic that she will have to remove him and find yet another placement, it is quite possible that Jesse will be taken for an evaluation of ADHD and receive medication to help him “calm down.”

Photo courtesy of electrictuesday.

Jesse certainly does need help in calming himself. He is, after all, only three years old and needs the reassurance of adults to manage his understandable anxiety. From what little we know of his history, we can reasonably assume that Jesse has had little experience of being comforted by a reliable adult. Not having been soothed by another, Jesse is unable to soothe himself. Not only is Jesse’s three-year-old neurological system developmentally immature, the lack of care and instability he has endured in his young life has likely resulted in his cognitive, social, and emotional development lagging considerably behind what we would expect of a well-cared for child of his chronological age.

Of course Jesse can’t focus. Why would we expect that he could? He’s a kid—a child who has had a traumatic introduction to life. He is a child who has every reason to be anxious—to be constantly on the lookout and on the move. And yet, there is a significant chance that he will be given medication when what he needs is a stable caregiver who can lend him her calm mind and soothing presence. Jesse needs to be held and rocked. He needs to hear lullabies and comforting words. He needs to see smiles and bright eyes when he looks into a loving face. This is how Jesse will develop a mind of his own.

It is likely that Jesse is no more able to control his mind than he is to control his behavior. However, when we rush to medicate children’s brains, we fail to attend to their minds. And when we turn to substances to control behavior we would do well to remember that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

By Toni Heineman

Over the last twenty years we have been amassing evidence that negative experiences in early childhood have life long deleterious effects on physical and emotional health. Early maltreatment results in years of emotional pain, chronic illness, and, too often, premature death.

As David Brooks reminds us the multiple lenses through which we have been able to view the initial findings of the survey of over 17,000 patients at Kaiser Permanente have contributed to an increasingly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the wide and long range effects of early adverse experiences. In some ways, the knowledge that the more children are exposed to adverse experiences—such as divorce, a substance abusing parent, abuse, domestic violence, or significant contact with an adult with serious mental illness—the more they will suffer has been woven into the fabric of our understanding of child development.

However, this knowledge has not been well integrated into programs designed to prevent or treat maltreatment. The reasons for this are multiple and complex and must draw on an appreciation of individual psychology, systems theory, the interface of political and economic forces and historical shifts in the ways in which we view children, maltreatment, and individual responsibility.

Photo courtesy of Natesh Ramasamy.

Although we know that adverse events in children’s lives rarely occur in isolation, we too often create programs designed to address a single issue or, recognizing that there are multiple problems, we introduce “wrap around” programs that bring together a team of experts to address the identified symptoms. Unfortunately, these professionals rarely have the time or funding to address the underlying issue, which often could best be described as chronic and unrelenting family and community chaos.

Consider, for example, children in the foster care system. The overwhelming majority of foster children have been removed from the care of their parents because of physical neglect (one of ten adverse childhood experiences). However, neglect typically results from parental substance abuse and/or mental illness, each adding an adverse experience and, most likely emotional abuse, adding yet another. Taken together, it is not difficult to imagine a child living in an environment that is wildly unpredictable with no certainty about the parent’s mood from day to day or hour to hour, no reason to assume that dinner will be on the table or that the night will not be interrupted by angry shouting.

For these children, whose lives are rife with adverse experiences, the whole is greater than the sum of the parents, particularly when the events stretch over weeks and months and even years. When they enter the foster care system, they need not only physical and emotional safety, but the security and sense of well-being that comes from a consistent, stable, caring relationship. Instead, they are often introduced to multiple people—each of whom has an important role to play—but none of whom is fully responsible for the child. This is not to discount the importance of what caseworkers, foster parents, attorneys, educational specialists, therapists, and community volunteers have to offer foster children.

What is missing for these children is the parental mind that mediates all of the child’s experiences—positive and negative. Without that single mind, the child lives in a fragmented world with no means of creating a coherent narrative. This is echoed in the systems that are supposed to be addressing the problems; they work in silos—sometimes at cross purposes, whether strategically or inadvertently.

Brooks suggests that we might begin to address these issues by bringing people together. That might be a first step or it may be just one more conference that sounds important and accomplishes little. We must not just talk about the importance of early experiences and children’s need for healthy relationships in order to thrive. We must integrate this knowledge into the fabric of every institution and program. Until we shift our culture to one that supports children and families we will continue to pay the price of psychological and systemic dysfunction.

By Toni Heineman

Many years ago I was asked to make a recommendation to the court about the fate of a toddler whose mother had been raised in foster care. Mother and daughter arrived at my office and immediately headed for a basket of toys. Sadly, the mother was more interested in playing with the toys herself than in helping or enjoying her daughter’s play. Over several sessions over a number of weeks, it became painfully clear that this young woman was totally unprepared for parenting and, sadly, seemed unable to use any help that others or I offered.  If her parental rights were terminated, chances were very good that she would have another baby and end up repeating an evaluation in a matter of a couple of years. If they were not, her daughter would most likely grow up in foster care with intermittent returns to her mother during protracted attempts at reunification and family preservation.

Imagine yourself in a similar situation—a sixteen-year-old girl—with a six-month-old baby. As an adolescent you are developmentally on track if you are working to define yourself as a person in relationship to your family, friends, and community. It takes years of experimentation with different ways of being in the world until the uncertainties of adolescence gradually coalesce into the more comfortable sense-of-self that begins to unfold in early adulthood. That’s all fine for the sixteen-year-old, but what about the baby?

The six-month-old is also trying to figure out how she fits into the world. She is learning to recognize different physical and emotional states and to signal her needs to her caregivers with increasing accuracy. Although she is busy exploring the world, developmentally, she sees herself at the center of the world and, as such, expects that her needs and desires should be first and foremost.

Of course, as a teenager, her mother is also preoccupied with her own needs and desires; this is part of the developmental process of self-discovery. Adolescence is hard; parenthood is hard; adolescent parenthood is even harder. Teen parents who have grown up in foster care and face both adolescence and parenting without parents to guide them are facing a formidable task, indeed. It is hardly surprising that the children of these young parents are five times more likely than other children to enter the foster care system.

Photo courtesy of storyvillegirl

Over the last few years important legislation has recognized the need for late teens and young adults to have the safety net of foster care beyond the age of eighteen. However, that system now finds itself responsible for the young parents who are among that group and there are many; fifty percent of young women in foster care will be parents by the age of twenty-one.

California’s State Senator Leland Yee and the John Burton Foundation are to be congratulated for their work on legislation to help address the unmet needs of this population, including providing subsidized childcare so that parents can complete their education and improve their chances of moving themselves and their children out of poverty. Of equal importance is the provision of education about sexual and reproductive health, which has been shown to decrease the chances of subsequent pregnancies.

As the child welfare system works to educate caseworkers, transitional housing staff, and others working with youth in extended foster care, they must now meet the additional challenge of offering training and support to the adults working to help young parents and their children. It is crucial that the adults charged with supporting young parents have education about the changing developmental needs of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as well as the needs of their parents, who are entitled to attention to their growth and development along with parenting support.

These are beginnings. But we must remember that the neither the young parents in foster care nor their children can afford for us to take baby steps. We must make courageous strides if we are to break this cycle of loss.

By Toni Heineman

A pregnant woman undergoing methadone treatment may find herself in an extremely difficult position. According to a recent article in The Daily Beast confusion, uncertainty, and disagreement among professionals may put expectant women in danger of losing their infants to the foster care system if they are considered to be drug addicted because they are receiving methadone to manage opiate withdrawal.

She may be cautioned by her addiction specialist that attempting to stop methadone treatment precipitously could lead to a relapse and/or a miscarriage or premature birth. Yet medical personnel who are not familiar with methadone treatment may simply consider it a narcotic, like any other, and evidence that the woman is a drug addict who is putting her unborn child at risk.

Although methadone maintenance is surely safer than a relapse and return to illicit drugs, infants exposed to methadone in utero can and do undergo withdrawal. Child welfare workers, judges, and some medical personnel consider this child abuse and grounds for removing infants from their mothers. Once the child has entered foster care the problem may become compounded because the mother’s continued treatment will make her test positive for opiate use. If, as is frequent, a condition for the return of her baby is that she be “clean and sober,” she faces the same dilemma that she did during pregnancy—risk a relapse that could endanger her life and put her at risk for not being able to provide adequate care for her child—or continue the treatment that could actually enhance her capacity to provide care and risk leaving her child in foster care.

As new medications for the treatment of opiate withdrawal become available, some of these problems may be lessened. However, in the meantime, strongly held beliefs about drug use and addictions, even when not supported by scientific evidence may lead to the unnecessary disruption of the lives of parents and newborns.

If some newborns do indeed have to suffer through the pain of withdrawal and the simultaneous loss of their mothers, we need to recognize that they will be starting their lives in double jeopardy. Certainly policies and programs that could offer these mothers the support they need to manage their pregnancies under competent medical care so that their babies can leave the hospital with them are a far preferable alternative to beginning life in foster care.

By Toni Heineman

Teenagers are interested in sex. Not only are they interested, but many of them are having sex. Some of them become parents as a result; in fact, seventy-one percent of young women in foster care will be pregnant before the age of twenty-one, many of them more than once.

Yet, according to a recent article by Ryann Blackshere of Fostering Media Connections, adults who are responsible for caring for foster youth appear to treat information about sex as something to be kept secret. At least, it’s not clear who, if anyone, is responsible for talking to foster youth about sex and pregnancy prevention.

Although sex education has become a routine part of the curriculum in many school systems, it is parents who are ultimately responsible for ensuring that their children are knowledgeable about sexual relationships. We want all teenagers and young adults to appreciate the importance of sexual behavior that is not only physically safe, but emotionally safe as well.

Photo courtesy of”Pushthisbutton”

Unfortunately, when the parent is not available it is not clear who holds the responsibility for teaching children about their bodies — including the care they need and the pleasures they offer. Unless someone is clearly designated to address these issues, it is too easy for adults to avoid conversations they may find anxiety-provoking or embarrassing.

Parents may take it upon themselves to learn about the best ways to talk to their children about sex. Teachers who are responsible for sex education have access to training and resources. If no one in the foster care community clearly has responsibility, then it is also unclear who should be trained in best practices.

And best practices are essential when it comes to teaching responsible sexual behavior in the foster care community. Given that parents who have grown up in the foster care system are five times more likely than their peers to lose their children to foster care, the prevention of premature pregnancy should be a top priority. Not only are these young parents vulnerable to losing their children to foster care, they are in danger of losing their adolescence to premature parenthood.

By Toni Heineman

This interview first appeared on Daily RX – Relevant Health News on June 4th, 2012.
To view the feature in its original location, click here to visit www.DailyRX.com.

It’s a staple of mental and emotional health that you must know how to build and maintain healthy relationships with others. But foster students lack this luxury.

After all, if the only relationships you ever knew ended in under a year, how would you ever learn the skill of forming lasting relationships and keeping them going even when the going gets tough? This dilemma is just one of the many challenges that face foster kids, some of whom may move homes more times than the number of years they’ve been alive.

A Home Within, a nonprofit organization with 50 chapters spread across 22 states, is aiming to change that cycle of broken relationships, one child-and-therapist pairing at a time.

For the past ten years, A Home Within has sought therapists who are willing to take on a single foster child for no fee as a long-term client, meeting them once a week to help them with the various emotional troubles that come with being in the foster system while simultaneously providing them at least one relationship that will last longer than a few months.

Dr. Toni Heineman, the executive director of A Home Within, recently shared with dailyRx the mission and the rewards of being a therapist for A Home Within. She hopes other mental health professionals across the U.S. will be inspired to commit some of their time and expertise to the organization.

How does A Home Within work?
A Home Within is a very simple model. We have clinicians that understand the importance of a consistent relationship and they agree to see one foster child for as long as it takes. The average length of treatment is three and a half years, but we have kids who have stayed in touch with their therapists for over 10 years.

We know the relationship makes a huge difference in the lives of these kids. They usually don’t get long-term relationships. They usually get interns, who leave after six months or a year, so these kids do not have the stability of relationships that all kids need to thrive. On the one hand, it’s a big “ask.” On the other hand, it’s just one kid and it can make a difference in the life of that child.

Describe the big picture of foster children’s lives.
By and large, their relationships are kind of like quicksand. They aren’t really stable. They’re usually separated from their biological parents, and they become separated from their foster parents. According to some surveys, most [non-foster] kids don’t become financially independent until age 26, and those are kids who are raised by parents so they’re pretty well-positioned for adulthood. In foster care, kids haven’t had the kind of stable childhood that prepares them to go into successful, productive adult lives. You need a lot of stability in your life to grow up.

Why kinds of mental health issues and challenges do foster children face?
They find it understandably incredibly difficult to trust people because people have let them down again and again and again – which makes it hard for them to get close to people. They often suffer from low self-esteem because it’s human nature to blame ourselves when things go wrong, and so they think they’re not lovable. We see a lot of depression and anxiety.

The biggest thing is that they find it hard to form relationships, and we all need relationships. We need people to turn to when we’re sad and need a shoulder to cry on. We need people to turn to when we’re happy and have good things to share. With their difficulties in trusting and building relationships, foster children often don’t have the opportunity to mourn all the losses they’ve experienced.

In foster care, we keep teaching kids how to start over. We don’t teach them how to stick around, and that doesn’t make for very good long-term relationships. Sticking around is what builds relationships. How do you go through the hard part of being in a relationship? How do you stick it out?

There are 500,000 kids in the system at any given time. About 800,000 pass through the system in a given year. They’re a vulnerable population, and they can really make use of psychotherapy. We have kids who have been in five or thirty different homes. I have one child who’s been with a therapist with five years, but she’s 9 and she’s had 14 different foster placements. We have moral responsibility to make things better for these kids.

What kinds of volunteer mental health professionals do you need?
We need three kinds of people: therapists, consultation group leaders and clinical directors. A therapist commits to seeing one foster child, teen or young adult once a week in therapy free of charge. Therapists also participate in a consultation group that connects them with colleagues. It’s hard work, and you need a lot of support. You might watch a webinar at these meetings, talk about the work or read relevant literature.

Consultation group leaders are people who are willing to lead weekly meetings for therapists to get professional development. It’s a learning community with continuing education credits free of charge, and it’s a great way to build a referral basis and network with people in the community. One of the things we hear over and over again is that the consultation group is one of the highlights of their week and an incredibly important part of the therapists’ development and network.

Clinical directors are the point persons of each community who become Fellows for us and establish and maintain a chapter of A Home Within, and that’s a three-year commitment of four hours a week and an annual training and retreat in San Francisco. The fellowships are also volunteer – we pay for the retreat, but we don’t pay any stipend. The retreat is a fabulous experience. People love it.

How do you match clinicians with children?
We have a pretty extensive process. We do a screening to make sure the therapists are qualified and know what they’re doing. We also find out what they’re more interested in – a little kid, a teenager, a young adult. Then when we have a child or adolescent or young adult that seems to match, we let the clinical director know and he or she is responsible for actually making the connection.

What if there’s not a local chapter?
If someone really wants to help out a foster kid, we want to do everything we can to make that happen, so we have a conversation with that person and see what we can do to make it work. We ask if they can help us find a clinical director, or maybe they could be part of an electronic consultation group. We have the technology, so let’s use it. We’ve had people call in by Skype, and we do board meetings electronically.

How does helping these children affect society?
It means that instead of having over 50 percent of the kids who spent time in the foster system in homeless shelters, unemployed or incarcerated or sending their children back into the foster care at a rate six times higher than the general population, they are finishing high school, attending college, getting educated, holding down jobs, paying taxes and becoming productive, satisfied members of society. That’s good for them, and that’s good for us.

What are your goals for the future?
We would like for therapists to think of A Home Within when they’re wanting to do pro bono work. I would love to have clinicians who are interested in providing mental health services to foster children and therapists who are in the communities we are currently not in if they are interested in helping us establish a community for A Home Within.

We’re also trying to reach out to the non-therapeutic community, like caseworkers or staff in group homes, to give them tools they can use. We have a web-based platform with materials for working with pregnant and parenting teens and aimed at staff working with a range of foster kids.

We can provide them with the resources to help with these populations even if they’re not mental health professionals. Often they’re asked to do the work without any training or education or support. Sometimes there are no therapists geographically or the culture doesn’t support psychotherapy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have access to best practices in theory to be helpful. We’re translating best practices into curriculum that’s useful for non-mental health professionals.

How can non-clinicians become involved with A Home Within?
If people can, they can help spread the word. They can help with media, they can do a small fundraising or awareness event. They can bring people over, share the materials, let them know what the needs of foster kids are, and if someone has an idea, we’d love to hear it. When I say we want to hear ideas, I really mean it. We know we have not cornered the market on ideas, and there may be something about spreading the word that we’re not doing. If anybody has any thoughts, they should be in touch.