Resource Library

Provides professionals with information to help children, youth, and adoptive families develop and maintain appropriate and evolving connections with birth families.

Discusses the parenting strategies needed for children who have experienced trauma, including trauma in-utero, such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Explores how staff in support programs can help parents and caregivers learn and apply trauma-responsive parenting strategies and support caregivers through challenges with these new techniques.

Provides insights and perspectives from adult adoptees who have become more involved in efforts to shape post-adoption programs to ensure that services are provided by adoptees for adoptees. Shares information about programs that are using a more adoptee-centered view of post-adoption support. 

Discusses how child welfare professionals can better utilize guardianship and highlights the importance of kinship care. This brief outlines the benefits of guardianship and addresses the challenges and areas of improvement in guardianship utilization. It advocates for a stronger kin-first approach in child welfare, promoting guardianship as a supportive and permanent placement option that benefits children, families and communities. Several examples are provided on how states use guardianship as a prevention strategy.

Examines various types of respite care services offered and provides examples of jurisdictions offering each type.

Describes 12 categories of support for children and youth—including life skills development, job training/employment support, and recreational experiences—and points to examples of successful support programs.

Reviews factors that affect adoption/guardianship disruption and how to respond to them, including examples from various states and jurisdictions.

Offers guidance about how to support LGBTQ+ employees such as conducting equity audits, ensuring leadership support, developing employee resource groups, offering inclusive benefits, etc.

Explores the impact of traumatic life events on children, including the significant risk for developing serious and long-lasting problems across multiple areas of development. Provides information about how children are far more likely to exhibit resilience to childhood trauma when child-serving programs, institutions, and service systems understand the impact of childhood trauma, share common ways to talk and think about trauma, and thoroughly integrate effective practices and policies to address it—an approach often referred to as trauma-informed care. Presents the four Rs of trauma-informed-care: Realize, Recognize, Respond, and Resist Re-traumatization.

Offers strategies for child welfare workers to develop a self-care plan to help avoid burnout.