Vol. 19, No. 2 • May 2015

Taking Care of Yourself

Being a resource parent can be one of the most important, most deeply rewarding roles in the world.

It can also be one of the hardest: intense, stressful, frustrating, and immensely draining.

If resource parents don’t make a serious commitment to self-care, they can quickly find themselves overwhelmed and ineffective. Because it is hard—some would say impossible—to support the recovery and healthy development of children who have experienced trauma if you aren’t doing so well yourself.

Self-care is a cornerstone of success for foster and adoptive parents and relative caregivers, a thing on which all other successes depend.

For this reason, this issue shares perspectives and reflections from foster parents and others and points you to self-care ideas and resources.

We sincerely hope this issue of Fostering Perspectives will help you build your resilience and commitment to taking care of yourself, so you can enjoy the rewards of caring for others for a long time to come.

	Download or print a pdf of this entire issue
Contents
	Self-Care: Do it for Yourself, Your Family, and Your Kids
	Social Connections and Self-Care
	My Ongoing Journey as a Foster Dad Or, learning to be the father my children need me to be
	Resource Parent Self-Care and Secondary Traumatic Stress
	Stress, Your Social Worker, and You A conversation with child welfare social workers
	Window Pain A broken porch window was the wake-up call our family needed
	Self-Care CFT Meetings for Resource Parents
	Mobile App for Building Resilience in Foster Families
	Adult Taking Care of Themselves . . . Perspectives from youth in foster care
	Taking Care of Yourself While Engaging in Shared Parenting
	SaySo Turns 17
	Remembering My First SaySo Survivor Weekend by La'Sharron Davidson
	Self-Care for Relative Caregivers: One Family's Story
	What Is Your Stress Level Today? Review of the documentary "Stress: A Portrait of a Killer"
	Foster Parent Training: Helping Youth Reach Self-Sufficiency
	Living with Addicts by Jacob, age 13
	Caring for Children Whose Parents Struggle with Drugs or Alcohol
	A Reader Asks Will I get the support I need if I transfer agencies?
	North Carolina Child Treatment Program
	Help Us Find Families for These Children
	Writing Contest
	References cited in this issue
	Get training credit for reading this newsletter!

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