Your Child's First Family: Openness, Contact and Telling the Story
A 2-hour parent training with a certificate, taught by an adult adoptee who grew up in a closed adoption and found his birth family at forty-nine.
What this course is
This course is for anyone getting ready to adopt or foster to adopt, and for parents in the first years after a child comes home. It fits any kind of adoption, including foster care, domestic infant, international and kinship adoption, whether your child shares your race or comes from a different background.
Each lesson starts with a true story from Michael's life as an adoptee, and then turns it into steps you can use at home. You'll learn to talk about birth parents with respect, plan contact that can change over the years and tell your child's story in small true pieces from the first day. The course takes about two hours, and you can stop and come back whenever you need to.
What you'll be able to do
- Talk about your child's birth parents as real people, with respect, in words that fit your child's age.
- Explain the difference between open, semi-open and closed adoption, and plan contact you can keep up as it changes.
- Tell your child their adoption story from the very first day, including the hard parts.
- Start a lifebook, gather records before they're lost and get your relatives ready to talk about the birth family kindly.
How the certificate works
- Take the opening quiz as a warm-up. It doesn't count toward your certificate.
- Work through the six lessons in order. Each one comes with a printable page you can fill in and keep.
- Type your plan right into the course, one line at a time. Each line comes with an example to help you.
- Pass the final quiz with at least 8 out of 10. You can retake it as many times as you need.
- Answer a short evaluation, and your certificate unlocks for 2 training hours.
Please check with your licensing worker or agency about how many hours they accept for self-paced training.
For agencies
This course covers training topics agencies already use, including connections with birth families after adoption, life story work, effective communication and family dynamics. It also fits the Kansas in-service topic on communicating and connections with birth families for licensed foster homes. Each lesson lines up with topics from the National Training and Development Curriculum (NTDC) and with the Hague training topics in 22 CFR 96.48(b). Beyond the Moment Adoption Studio isn't affiliated with NTDC. Agencies can license this course for all of their families, and you can set that up by emailing hello@beyondthemomentadoptionstudio.com.
About your instructor
Michael Gaither is an adult adoptee. He was born in Syracuse, New York, and spent about eighteen months in foster care before he was adopted. He grew up with a white family in Lincoln, Nebraska, and met his birth family in person for the first time at forty-nine.
He spent 30 years in education as a teacher and a principal, and 13 of those years running his own executive leadership coaching business for school principals. His book, I Was Your Black Child: What White Parents Raising Black Children Need to Hear Before It's Too Late, tells the story of growing up Black in a white household. Through Beyond the Moment Adoption Studio, he helps adoptive and foster families understand what their children may be carrying.
Course curriculum
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1Start Here
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2The Six Lessons
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3Finish and Get Your Certificate