When the Plan Is Home: Supporting Your Child's Return to Their Parents
For foster and kin caregivers helping a child stay close to their parents and get ready to go home. A 2-hour training with a certificate.
What this course is
This is the first course in the Family Who Stepped In series. It's written for anyone caring for a child whose case plan is reunification. That covers licensed foster parents and relatives raising a grandchild, niece or nephew, licensed or not. It fits a grandmother whose own daughter is working her case plan, and it fits a family meeting a child's mom and dad for the first time. Michael Gaither teaches it. He started out in foster care as a baby and later spent 30 years in schools as a teacher and a principal. Each lesson takes about twenty minutes, and you can print every page.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain the plan to go home in words that fit your child's age.
- Build a respectful working relationship with your child's parents, even when it's hard.
- Help your child get ready for family time and settle down after it.
- Give your child permission to love both families without picking one.
- Plan a goodbye that helps your child leave well, and take care of yourself if the case changes.
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
Agencies can license this course for all of their foster and kin families. 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