Description

Kinship care is tough-in a lot of ways, but what makes kinship care especially challenging is caring for your relative or fictive kin child while also trying to maintain a positive relationship with the child’s biological parent. What makes this challenging is trying to be a parent to a child while navigating this new relationship with your own family member or friend. Oftentimes, this complex relationship often comes with lots of questions-yours and the child’s, especially as it pertains to visitation for the child and their parents.

Join us on March 14, 2023 as we discuss ways to help kinship families navigate this very difficult world of visitation with birth parents, and the questions and issues that can result in the most therapeutic way possible. Whether those children have questions about whether they have to attend the visits, what is going to happen during the visit, and when they will go back home, or, how caregivers must learn how to handle difficult situations such as if the birth parent does not attend the visit, makes promises to the child during the visit, displays negative behavior following the visit, or responds to difficult questions that can come from the visit.

About the Trainer:

Angie Maldonado is a Marriage and Family Therapy Associate, who is the proprietor of Hope in Healing Counseling Services in Lexington, KY. Prior to offering therapeutic services, Angie worked for the Department for Community Based Services as a Social Service Clinician providing reunification services for families and children in foster care and supporting relative placements. Angie saw the importance of nurturing children placed out of their home and became a foster parent herself for several years, after she left the Cabinet.

For the past eight years, Angie has worked with families and children in custody/divorce proceedings, conducting timesharing and custody evaluations, specializing in domestic violence cases, where she provides the Court recommendations with a child’s best interest at the forefront. Through these experiences, Angie witnessed the mental health effects of trauma on children and saw the importance of providing therapeutic services in a way that supports the short- and long-term well-being of children and seeks to provide that through her practice. She specializes in high-conflict family dynamics, including parent-child contact issues. In addition to her work with children and families through therapy, Angie is also court appointed to provide therapeutic visitation services and parenting coordination services.

Please note: Although this LIVE webinar is designed to be an informative, educational, and helpful resource for kinship families caring for relative or fictive kin children, anyone is welcome to attend including foster parents, professionals, students, or community members.

It is our hope that by participating in this LIVE webinar, attendees will receive educational and helpful information. However, it is important to note that this webinar is not approved for foster parent training credit or CEU’s as attendance is not monitored during the webinar event.