A Safe Environment for Foster Children Series -
Safe Environment is a parent training classic. For over a decade now, foster and adoptive parents have been listening to and learning from this three-part videotape series on understanding and dealing with sexually abused children. The series' coverage is comprehensive and organized, but its long-standing favor among parents has as much to do with the open, warm, and personal way it handles this important and sensitive topic.
The first video on Managing Sexual Acting Out Behavior is hosted by two specialists: Janis Elliot, foster parent and teacher, and Pat O'Brien, therapist and social worker. Setting the relaxed, intimate, and expert tone that permeates this series, they draw the viewer into a dialog on key background issues for parents: what sexual abuse is; what parents' roles are; how abuse affects family members; and the rollercoaster path of treatment. The two experts then discuss how to set up appropriate rules for maintaining a safe environment. The steps in their parenting strategies are clearly explained and modeled in dramatized vignettes with foster families. They also cover in depth how these strategies can be applied to two typical sexual acting-out behaviors: seductiveness and masturbation.
In the second video on Understanding and Dealing with Anger, Pat O'Brien begins by closely examining why abused children develop and express anger and how that affects the family. The why focuses on the trauma of abuse, placement, and going through the foster care system and courts. The how looks at the impact that children's disturbed behaviors have on the power, structure, and roles within the family. These issues are brought home by three children who tell their stories of abuse and subsequent placement. The second half of program presents techniques on how parents can defuse the anger in a positive way. As in the first tape, these strategies are modeled in dramatized vignettes. The video closes with an open discussion among foster parents in a support group who share their related experiences and insights.
In the third video,A Time and Place for Healing, Pat O'Brien turns to national expert, pediatrician, and foster mother, Vera Fahlberg, for answers to what parents can do on a daily basis to help heal sexually-abused children. In her characteristically insightful and endearing way, Dr. Fahlberg gives parents practical suggestions on helping abused children care for their bodies, understand their sexuality, and deal with fears, night terrors, bed-wetting, depression, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and eating disorders. Throughout the interview Dr. Fahlberg underscores how parents' everyday efforts can normalize, stabilize, and comfort these children.
The two hours of instruction presented throughout the series consistently keeps the main goal in focus: how parents can create a safe environment for abused kids. Each video also includes a helpful discussion guide. The programs can be viewed independently but you'll gain much more when you watch the three-part series.
