Life Story Work With Children Who Are Fostered Or Adopted

The number of traumatized children in foster care and adoptive families is on the rise every year. In times like these, social work practitioners rarely have sufficient time to plan out each of their sessions. This book makes it possible. Life Story Work with Children who are Fostered or Adopted: Creative Activites and Ideas is a brief and accessible resource guide to life story work. Focused on methods and activities that have been tried and tested by social workers and therapists, these are simple activities that require minimal resources that range from how to build the foundation to Life Story Work to boosting a child's self-esteem and identity. The chapters are categorized in a way that makes it easy for the practitioner to identify which method will be appropriate for the stage of the work they are undertaking. This book will be a vital resource for social workers, foster caregivers, students and any frontline practitioner involved in working with traumatized children.

Through words, pictures, photographs, certificates and other 'little treasures', a Life Story Book provides a detailed account of the child's early history and a chronology of their life. Fully updated, this clear and concise book shows a unique family-friendly way to compile a Life Story Book which promotes a sense of permanency for the child, and encourages attachments within new families. Joy Rees' influential model works chronologically backwards rather than forwards, aiming to reinforce the child's sense of belonging and security before addressing the child's past and early trauma. The book contains simple explanations of complex concepts, practical examples, helpful suggestions and includes some simple checklists. This new edition has been expanded to include fostered children and those living in kinship care or with a special guardian. Perfect for social workers, adoption agencies, adoptive parents, foster carers and kinship carers, Life Story Books for Adopted and Fostered Children is a refreshing, innovative and common-sense guide.

This new book from life work expert Joy Rees explains the value of effective and meaningful life work with children who are fostered and adopted, and how best to carry this out. This book will help social work professionals, foster carers and adopters to understand the many aspects of life work and to consider the important contributions they can all make to this task. Life work is about helping children to know and to understand their personal stories and the life experiences that have shaped them. Enabling children to reach their potential and achieve the best possible outcome is the common goal, and this is best achieved by using the collaborative approach to life work advocated in this book

Life story work is an approach designed to enable traumatized children to explore, question and understand the past events of their lives. It aims to secure their future by strengthening attachment with their carers and providing the opportunity to develop a healthy sense of self and a feeling of wellbeing. This new edited volume documents innovative ways in which life story work has been developed. It draws on the work of nine life story centres based around the world and provides understanding and guidance for those working with children who have experienced trauma. The book illustrates current theory and practice and looks at how the approach is being used in a variety of settings including schools, intensive services, youth justice, and post-adoption support, highlighting its versatility. The importance of trauma-informed practice when working with vulnerable children is emphasised throughout, to help practitioners provide the best for the children in their care.

This concise book shows a new family-friendly way to compile a Life Story Book that promotes a sense of permanency for the child, and encourages attachments within the adoptive family. Joy Rees' improved model works chronologically backwards rather than forwards, aiming to reinforce the child's sense of security within the adoptive family.

Narrative and Dramatic Approaches to Children’s Life Story with Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Families outlines narrative and dramatic approaches to improve vulnerable family relationships. It provides a model which offers new ways for parents to practise communicating with their children and develop positive relationships. The book focuses on the Theatre of Attachment model - a highly innovative approach which draws from a strong theoretical base to demonstrate the importance of narrative and dramatic play for sharing the children’s life history in the family home with their adoptive, foster or kinship parents. An emphasis is on having fun ways to work through complex feelings and divided loyalties, so as to secure attachment. This practice model aims to raise children’s self-esteem and communication skills and to combat the profound effects of abuse, neglect on trauma on children’s development. This book will be of great interest for academics, post-graduate students, universities and Training bodies, service providers and practitioners involved in social work and creative therapies, child psychologists, child psychotherapists and public and private adoption and foster care agencies.

This authoritative guide will help anyone who wants to use life story work as a way of helping children. This comprehensively revised and attractively illustrated edition has been updated in light of all recent legislation. It incorporates substantial new material from other contributors and presents an assortment of useful techniques and exercises for adults working with children in different settings. The authors also explain how new interactive media can be particularly helpful for many children, and describes successful interactive resources.