A Child’s Song offers group counselling for individuals, youth, and parents focused on the experiences of adoptees, former youth in care and parents. Group counselling offers and opportunity for participants to explore important issues with the support of a psychologist clinical counsellor or social worker and other members who share similar experiences.
Mom’s Therapy Group is an opportunity for foster, adoptive and permanent mom’s to explore their own emotional experience of raising a child(ren) with trauma and attachment losses. Group discussion will focus on the exploring different ways of thinking about and responding to the incredibly difficult circumstances mom’s find themselves in every day so that they can also be well and live full lives.
The facilitator, Andrea Chatwin, is an adoptive parent herself and has had the privilege of walking alongside many foster and adoptive mom’s as they navigate the complicated experience of being fully committed to their child and wanting more for themselves. Her goal for this group is to help moms to find more confidence, peace, and balance in their lives through connection to self and others.
The group content will focus on the following topic areas:
Trauma and Attachment Parenting (TAP 101) is a 10 week group for anyone parenting children who have been impacted by trauma and attachment loss. Participants will become familiar with how early activation of the stress system impacts a child’s arousal, behavior and attachments through neurological and relational systems. The group will support parents in understanding how children communicate their needs and proven strategies for responding to challenging behaviors. Parents can expect to strengthen connection with their children through clinically proven relationship-based practice activities. Each session will provide an opportunity to reflect on how to apply new concepts and encourage each other in the mastery of new skills. This group is offered in both BC and Manitoba.
Young Adult Adoptee Group Therapy (ages 19 - 28) has been specifically designed to meet the needs of young adult adoptees who feel that there current experience in the world is impacted by their experience of adoption. This group offers an opportunity for adoptees to find connection and affirmation through the shared stories of others who understand the full impact of adoption from childhood through to adulthood. The group facilitator, Dr. Joanne Crandall, is herself and adoptee and brings to this group both her own life experience and what she has learned from many years of providing therapy for adoptees across the lifespan.
Topics covered in this group will include:
Next group offering will be Thursday evenings from May 2 - June 6, 2024. Intake for this group will be open on March 1, 2024.
Child Parent Relationship Therapy is a special 10 session parent training program that can be offered in a group format. It focuses on strengthening the relationship between a parent and a child by using 30 minute playtimes once a week. The playtimes are conducted in the family home and video taped so that they can be played for review in group session.
CPRT is based on the premise that play is important to children because it is the most natural way children communicate. Toys are like words for children and play is their language. Adults talk about their experiences, thoughts and feelings. Children use toys to explore their experiences and express what they think and how they feel. Parents are taught to have special structured 30 minute playtimes with their child using a kit of carefully selected toys in their own home. Parents learn to respond empathically to their child’s feelings, build their self esteem, help their child learn self control and self responsibility, and set therapeutic limits during special play times.
In special playtimes you will build a different kind of relationship with your child and your child will discover she is capable, important, understood and accepted as she is. How your child feels about herself will make a significant difference in her behavior. Other demonstrated positive outcomes from CPRT are increased parent satisfaction, decreased parent frustration and improved communication between parent and child.
A new research study looking at this method its effectiveness for adoptive families demonstrated that CPRT could be adapted to meet the specific needs of adoptive families.
