Course Catalog
Browse our catalog of online courses & check back as we regularly add more content!
Foster Care and Adoption Basics
Covering the basics for parents navigating their journey in foster care and adoption.
Fostering Teens 101
Best-selling author Tori Hope Petersen is a former foster youth, mom, and advocate for underserved people. In this course she shares her personal experience in foster care and the people who made a difference in her life. She provides practical tips on ways to connect with and care for teens, pre-teens, and even school-aged children.
Preview This CourseIntro to Foster Care and Adoption Series
Intro to Foster Care and Adoption Series looks at the foundations of foster care and adoption through a Biblical philosophy and addresses the myth that “adoption is God’s Plan B for my family.”
Responding to Children in Crisis
This theme highlights some of the difficulties children who have experienced trauma, separation or loss can have in regulating themselves. The theme reviews the different phases of crisis and provide parents who are fostering or adopting with strategies to proactively prevent a crisis from occurring. This theme reviews ways to keep the children safe when they are having a crisis and strategies that can help to de-escalate the situation.
Family Dynamics
This theme provides an overview of the impact fostering or adopting can have on family dynamics including the impact on marital relationships, biological children, foster or adoptive children already living in the home and extended family members. The theme helps parents who are fostering or adopting gain insight and increased understanding of how their family may need to adjust, as well as strategies that they can use to support healthy family dynamics.
Life Story, Birth Story and Adoption Story
This theme helps adoptive parents understand the importance of having ongoing conversations with their children about their birth and adoption story. The theme discusses how empowering children with the missing pieces of their story can help them build trust in family relationships, help with healthy identity formation, and can lead to stronger connections with birth family members. In this theme, adoptive parents learn how to have on-going conversation with their children about their life story that is done in an inclusive, open fashion.
Managing Placement Transitions
This theme provides an overview of the impact transitions, both planned and unplanned, have on children who have experienced trauma, loss or separation. The theme discusses strategies parents can use to make these transitions less traumatic and disruptive. Strategies for making children feel welcomed and connected before, during, and after transitions occur are shared.
Accessing Services and Supports
How to become an advocate for children in your home to ensure they receive the services and supports that they need.
Building Children’s Resilience
Understand concepts and definitions related to enhancing the resilience of children who have experienced trauma, separation, or loss. Protective factors are described along with strategies on how to build upon these factors to support children develop their identity, self-esteem, and skills toward self-advocacy.
Building Parental Resilience
This course discusses the importance of self-care for parents who are fostering or adopting as well as practical ideas on how to incorporate it into their daily routines. The course will help parents learn why maintaining their own mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being is so important when caring for children who have experienced trauma, separation or loss.
Education
This theme helps parents who are fostering or adopting understand some of the educational challenges children who have experienced trauma, separation or loss may encounter. The theme highlights some of the services and supports that can be put in place for children including Individualized Education Plans (IEP) and 504 plans as well as strategies that can be used to partner and advocate with the school system to ensure their educational needs are being sufficiently addressed.
Preparing for Adulthood
This theme provides an overview of the common skills that youth will need to effectively navigate as an adult and provide strategies on how families who are fostering or adopting can prepare youth to successfully transition into adulthood. The theme highlights the variance that can exist between chronological and developmental age for children who have experienced trauma, separation and loss and how this can impact the transition to adulthood. Some of the challenges that youth may face during this transition are highlighted.
Preparing for and Managing Visitation
This theme provides an overview of the importance of children maintaining visits with their family and how to check in and address concerns, questions and emotions children may encounter before and after the visits. The theme provides strategies on how to help children name and validate the range of feelings they may experience before, during and after a visit and understand the role that parents who are fostering or adopting play in these visits.
Sensory Integration
This theme briefly explores how early childhood trauma and neglect may impact a child’s ability to interact successfully with their outside world – sensory integration. This theme provides parents who are fostering or adopting with the ability to identify behaviors related to sensory integration difficulties and strategies to aid a child with sensory integration challenges in the home, school, and community.
Mental, Physical, & Educational Health
Offering deep insights into the special mental, physical and educational needs of foster and adopted children, and provide practical tools for caregivers.
Intro to FASD and the Neurobehavioral Model
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a part of many foster and adoptive children’s stories but is often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Sandra Flach is the founder of Justice for Orphans and adopted mother of two FASD children. She shares her story, general knowledge of FASD, the reality of living with FASD children, and how different parenting is required to best meet the needs of these children using the neurobehavioral model and brain-based research.
Preview This CourseFoster Parent Autism Training
Behavioral Pediatrics Resource Center provides information to understand how to serve children with autism spectrum disorders. The goal of this training is to provide awareness for individuals caring for children with autism. It will answer questions related to the difference between autism and autism spectrum disorder, signs of autism, and the effects on a child and family dealing with autism, as well as tips for a successful home.
Inter-Country Adoptions Medical Considerations
This course highlights some of the common medical conditions impacting children who have experienced institutionalization, including malnutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, and exposure to maternal substance usage. The required U.S. visa medical clinic assessment is reviewed as well as the importance of early and regular pediatric appointments with an adoption-competent medical professional.
Building Confidence
Building confidence in your child is important. Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, explains how to instill confidence through simple and practical ways.
Preview This CourseGrief and Loss
The feelings of grief and loss are real and often experienced by all – parents and children – in fostering situations. Understanding the reality, the factors impacting these feelings, and the stages of grief are covered in this training.
Parenting Your Anxious Child Series
Parenting is often difficult. Parenting a child with anxiety adds another level to the difficulty, and anxiety is seen in children now more than ever before. In this five-part series, Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, looks at understanding and relating to children struggling with anxiety and how we, as parents, can help them succeed! Earn up to 4 CEs.
Preview This CourseThe 4 R’s of Education Advocacy
Knowing how to advocate for your special needs child isn’t always easy, but LaToya Gray shares the 4 R’s — Relationships, Rights, Responsibility, Relevance — on this subject and reminds us that keeping Christ at the center is the most important.
Preview This CourseValidation
Everyone wants their feelings and actions validated, and children are no exception. Join Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, to learn how to help your child feel validated even when a behavior needs to be modified.
Preview This CourseParenting Techniques
Offering hope and wisdom to foster and adoptive parents in areas such as communication, family dynamics, relational needs, and more.
Brave Parenting: Goal Setting
Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, shares the importance of setting goals for you and the children in your home, as the first course in the Brave Parenting series.
Preview This CourseBrave Parenting: Prioritizing Goals
Ashlyn Ellington continues the Brave Parenting series by prioritizing the previously set goals into 3 manageable categories to avoid meltdowns in your home.
Brave Parenting: Working With Basket B
In the final course of the Brave Parenting series, Ashlyn Ellington takes the prioritized goals you already set and provides strategies to address those key behaviors of Basket B.
Confronting the Fear of Not Having What it Takes
Dr. Curt Thompson and Jason Johnson confront the question of “Do I have what it takes?” and the real roots of this fear.
Emergency Plan B Skills When Plan A Doesn’t Work!
Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, knows that even the best formulated Plan A doesn’t always work. She shows how to develop Plan B Skills for these times.
Preview This CourseEstablishing Healthy Communication
Healthy communication is key to any relationship, and the relationship you have with your child is no exception. Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, reveals how we all may have barriers that interfere with our ability to effectively communicate…and what to do about that.
Preview This CourseFor Foster Dads Series
Jason Johnson, Director of Church Mobilization and Engagement with Christian Alliance for Orphans, foster dad, author, and blogger hosts this premium content, four-part series designed to encourage and inspire foster dads. Each session includes teaching from Jason, reflection questions, and interviews with other foster dads. Earn up to 6.5 CEs.
Honoring Your Child’s Story
Luke and Katie McGee, foster and adoptive parents, discuss the importance of evaluating your own story and past in an effort to help the children in your home do the same. You will also hear from Kris, a former foster child, who shares her story.
Preview This CourseHope and Truth When You Are In Over Your Head
Beth Guckenberger is the Co-Executive Director of Back2Back Ministries. She is a speaker, author, missionary, Bible teacher and parent. In this training, Beth shares stories and encouragement for foster and adoptive parents, dealing with teens, children, and situational circumstances through God’s truths.
Is Love a Commodity in Parenting?
Does your life, and particularly your parenting, show the fruit of the Spirit? Drs. Scott and Rochelle LePor share their look at love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and the necessity of all of these in effective parenting.
Obstacles Hindering Effective Parenting
Cindy Lee is the Executive Director of HALO Project, an intensive intervention program for foster and adoptive children. She discusses the lies we often believe and how they can be dispelled through the truth found in God.
Preview This CoursePractical Tools For Parents
Ryan North shares practical tools for parents from a TBRI lens: allowing for flexibility, modifying the environment, building emotional vocabularies, meeting needs, identifying triggers, balancing nurture and structure, responding appropriately, and practicing kindness.
Preparing Yourself For Adoption
Katie McGee, licensed counselor, social worker, TBRI Practitioner, and adoptive parent, discusses the questions to address and work needed for you to be ready for your future children. She digs into looking at past trauma, the 4 styles of attachment, and understanding empathy. You’ll also hear from a foster parent who adopted three children at different ages and empty nesters who found themselves called to adopt a sibling group of teens.
Preview This CourseReframing Success and Failure in Foster Care
Jason Johnson and Dr. Curt Thompson present the idea that success is not only in the outcome but in saying “yes” to the calling.
Relational Needs of Teenagers
Teenagers often feel isolated, alone, unheard, and misheard. Their relational needs are different from when they were children. Bryan Davidson, founder of Whisper, and pastor Nathan Castleberry, share how to meet the relational needs of the teenagers in your home.
Preview This CourseRethinking Your Parenting
Seeing scripture in a brand new way, as it relates to parenting and connectedness with others, changed Scott LePor. The LePors share Jesus’ blessings of the Beatitudes from Matthew 5 in a personal and introspective look and how it impacted them.
Supporting Biological Children with Foster Siblings
“How does fostering affect your biological children?” is a question foster parents often hear from others. Join us as we discuss ways to meet the needs of our biological children while fostering and ways to answer this question in the frame of the gospel. Stephanie Watts, National Certified Counselor and foster mom, shares her experiences in her own family as well as her clinical expertise.
Preview This CourseThe Next Faithful Steps in Adopting and Fostering
This course describes ways foster parent(s) can serve in foster care when there is no way to know what the next steps will be, and how to navigate working alongside biological parents.
We Can Do Hard Things
Hard things are hard, but confronting this truth and realizing the glory that results are worth it.
Safety
Covering a variety of safety topics including car safety, sex education, smart phones, and internet and social media concerns.
Anti-Trafficking: 101 from One More Child
Human Trafficking is an insidious crime. Although it is frequently depicted in the news, movies, and social media, it is often misunderstood. In this series, we hope to help you understand what human trafficking is and whom it affects. You will learn how to “See it” in our very own communities; you will learn how to “Say it” by discovering the proper channels of reporting; we will also discuss how to “Stop it” to put an end to the suffering of God’s children; and finally, we will cover how each of us should respond so that we can reach one more.
Preview This CourseSafe Sleep for Babies
This training is intended to educate participants on safe sleep environments, correct common misconceptions about safe sleep practices, and answer frequently asked questions. It is our mission to ensure that families and professionals are receiving accurate and consistent safe infant sleep education and guidance so they can make informed decisions about how and where infants will sleep. The Georgia Safe to Sleep effort is adapted from the the national Safe to Sleep® Campaign, led by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Self Care
Providing support and guidance for the emotional and physical toll parenting takes, including tools for spiritual growth, marital health, and building community.
The Hard and Holy of Fostering and Adopting
It may be difficult to admit, but we have all had days when we want to throw the towel in and give up. Foster advocate, adoptive dad, and pastor, Renaut van der Riet is no stranger to that feeling. Simply put: fostering and adopting are not easy. Through Biblical truths, real conversations, and relatable stories Renaut will help you see that in the hardest moments, we have the opportunity to step closer to the holiness of our calling, giving a fresh perspective to the kingdom work we are doing.
Preview This CourseMap for Healthy Christian Foster, Adoptive, and Kinship Families
Do you feel overwhelmed and under-equipped in your fostering or adoption journey? Are you discouraged? You are not alone! God’s calling on us is a whole family journey and this course will walk you through the core building blocks of what it is to be a healthy Christian family. This 5-session series from Finally Home shows a “map” of the fundamental skills that are found in healthy individuals and families.
Preview This CourseSelf Care
Providing support and guidance for the emotional and physical toll parenting takes, including tools for spiritual growth, marital health, and building community.
Bragging Rights as a Parent
Kondo Simfukwe, pastor and adoptive dad, looks at how his bragging rights turned into a better understanding of Christ’s sufficient grace in weakness.
Preview This CourseFaith in the BIG Emotions of Parenting
Beth Guckenberger is the Co-Executive Director of Back2Back Ministries. She is a speaker, author, missionary, Bible teacher and parent. In this training, Beth shares the role faith plays in navigating the BIG emotions of parenting.
Preview This CourseFostering and Adopting in a Co-Missional Marriage
Beth Guckenberger is the Co-Executive Director of Back2Back Ministries. Through their fostering, adopting, and parenting journey, she and her husband Todd have learned the blessing of a co-missional marriage and how to fight together against the enemy.
Preview This CourseRhythms for Calm Parenting Series
Jedd Medefind discusses the rewards God offers that result in soul-filling restoration and calm parenting in this four-part series. Earn up to two CEs.
Preview This CourseThe Importance of Living in Community
Connection is key! Jason Johnson and Dr. Curt Thompson illustrate how scripture points to the importance of connection and community for parents and children.
Preview This CourseToo Tired to Hear God
Beth Guckenberger is a wife, mom to 11, missionary, teacher, and co-executive director of Back2Back Ministries. She knows about being tired, and in this training she shares what she has found to be true when she’s been too tired to hear from God.
Trauma Informed Behavior Management
Parenting techniques to establish meaningful connections and address challenging behaviors of children who have experienced significant trauma.
Challenging Behaviors
Challenging behaviors are challenging! Ryan North, TBRI Practitioner, foster and adoptive dad, shares how to create relationships and an environment that result in a decrease in challenging behaviors.
Preview This CourseEPIC: Introduction Course
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids. “EPIC” is an acronym that makes it easy for caregivers to remember that to deepen their connection with a child or teen, they need to address their Emotional, Physical, Intellectual, and Character-based needs. Kids who have experienced any kind of abuse, neglect, or abandonment can especially benefit from having trusted adults in their life who use the EPIC Therapeutic Approach.
EPIC: Our Lens
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
EPIC: E is for Emotional
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
EPIC: P is for Physical
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
EPIC: I is for Intellectual
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
EPIC: C is for Character
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
EPIC: Conclusion and Q&A
4KIDS developed the EPIC Therapeutic Approach to uniquely teach parents, educators, and other community members how to tap into the power of trust-based relationships with kids.
Fear and Felt Safety
There is a significant difference between being safe and feeling safe. Ryan North, TBRI Practitioner, foster and adoptive dad, discusses how parents can positively impact children to bridge the gap between being and feeling.
How Your Past Affects Their Behavior
Through relatable and honest stories and teaching, Drs. Scott and Rochelle LePor share the various caregiving styles and how understanding their pasts affected their parenting. This understanding prompted a change in their family.
Managing Transitions and Meltdowns
Ryan North, TBRI Practitioner, foster and adoptive dad, offers solutions for better managing transitions, from daily to major, to lessen the meltdowns that often result.
Not Your Daddy’s Discipline
Drs. Scott and Rochelle LePor discovered that traditional parenting and discipline methods do not breed connectedness and are not the model Christ provided. They share stories and insight into the value of TBRI (Trust-Based Relational Intervention).
Preview This CourseReinforcement and Consequences
Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, dives into the often confusing, but necessary, part of dealing with a child’s behavior — reinforcement and consequences.
Relationships Matter
Ryan North emphasizes the importance of relationships, how they can be agents of change, and the healing that can occur as a result.
Rupture and Repair
Brokenness and trauma may be a part of a child’s story, but Ryan North teaches how to lovingly and intentionally repair the rupture that has occurred.
The Purpose Behind the Behavior
Ashlyn Ellington, a licensed therapist, looks at the reason and purpose behind a child’s behavior.
Social Media and Internet Safety
Navigating technology with the children in your home isn’t easy, and while there are positives, the negatives are ever-present and require constant attention. Detective Phillip Grant, a special victims unit police officer, shares what to look for to help keep your children safe.
Preview This Course