We offer training in therapeutic parenting because learning to parent therapeutically is the single most important thing you can do to help your adopted child. Support and therapeutic services can provide help at critical times and with specific aspects of adoption, but it is the everyday interventions of parents, teachers and child carers that have the most power to transform a child’s life.

Much of traditional parenting assumes that a child feels safe at home and trusts their parents and their motives to care for and discipline them. This style of parenting also assumes that children learn from consequences, are able to do a lot for themselves, and accept their parents’ values, ideals, and goals. For adopted children these assumptions are wrong. Our children have had experiences that young children should never have to go through. They have felt scared and alone, been abandoned, hurt or hungry early in life and they’ve had no choice but to adapt to survive these experiences.

When our children come to live with us, these adaptations show up as difficult behaviours that make it hard for us to care for them. This is especially challenging when a child appears to not need us and won’t allow us to love them. We believe that therapeutic parenting can help build and nurture these connections into a way that allows our children to accept our efforts to parent and love them.

Therapeutic parenting is an intensive type of parenting based on high structure, high nurture, empathy and acceptance. It is aimed at connecting with a traumatised child so they can feel safe enough to begin to heal and attach.