Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Marriage or Partnership (While Raising Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children)

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Raising kids impacted by adoption, foster care, or kinship care can do a number on your marriage or life partnership. Join us for a conversation with Jeremy & Jara Walden, authors of The Heart Work of Foster Care: A Hopeful and Honest Guide to Foster Parenting, about strategies to re-prioritize and strengthen your most significant relationship.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How can raising kids together enhance a marriage or relationship?
• Why are kids in our community often harder to parent?
  • Trauma, loss, neglect
  • Prenatal substance exposure
  • Challenging behaviors that come from those experiences
• Why and how might our kids’ needs test our adult relationships?
• What are some of the additional stressors our relationships may face when fostering or adopting kids who’ve been exposed to trauma?
• What are some challenging behaviors kids who’ve experienced trauma can bring that might be particularly difficult for the marriage?
• What are some signs that we may be neglecting or at least not maintaining our significant relationship?
• How does your history impact your marriage, while raising kids with trauma impacts?
• Can you offer specific strategies for “going back,” healing, or re-prioritizing our marriages or partnerships if we are listening to this and realize we haven’t done so?
• How do single parents prioritize the adult relationships that they value?

Support the show

Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.

Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building