Counseling

Services for children and families at Kinship House

All services are provided by one or more members of the Kinship house professional team, representing more than 75 years of clinical experience and an average tenure of 7 years of service at Kinship House. Many of our clinicians have personal experience as foster or adoptive parents, and several are adept with bi-racial and bi-lingual clients. The clinical team, bringing professionalism and sensitivity to each unique client relationship, pools the collective strength of each therapist to provide appropriate, innovative and responsive professional treatment.

Therapy sessions typically are one hour once a week with a dedicated clinician at the Kinship House. Sessions may range from 2 to 12 months. To find out more or to enroll in any of these services, contact Kinship House at 503.460.2796.

Individual Therapy for Children & Adults
Individual therapy is used with children and adults who require a person outside of their family to help them explore emotional challenges. Teenagers, who are developmentally in a place of separation and individuation, often benefit from some individual counseling. Personal, confidential sessions with a Kinship House professional clinician offer a child, teen or adult a chance to understand, adapt, modify and integrate new skills and tools to support successful transitions.

Family Therapy
Family therapy, involving appropriate biological, adoptive or foster family members is the treatment of choice for children with attachment challenges. By learning from and sharing approaches with participating kin, our goal is to help the child integrate in a healthy way, and eventually improve their behavior and emotional concerns while building a familial support network.

Sibling Group Therapy
Sibling group therapy is often helpful for adoptive or foster children who are living together or in separate homes. Facilitated small group sessions enable children to talk about past trauma, loss, and hardships experienced together and to develop and reinforce positive future interactions. Our focus is to help children learn positive new sibling roles, and develop healthier family relationships.

Prospective Adoptive Parents
Parents may seek to consult with a Kinship House clinician about the joys and struggles they may face when adopting a child. While many transitions initiate smoothly, questions and challenges about adoptions may arise at any point. Sharing and learning through responsive and experienced counsel is encouraged.

Home Visits
Home visits may be appropriate in some circumstances, and are provided by Kinship House therapists. However, for many of the services we offer, children prefer coming to Kinship House, getting a snack and enjoying the warmth of our homelike facility!

Assessments

Mental Health Assessments
Conducted by a Kinship House clinical team member, mental health assessments identify a child's emotional and mental health needs, and potential behavioral disorders. Clinicians integrate data received from other professional sources with information gathered through play, art or conversational sessions with the child.

Child Welfare Assessments
Sibling Assessments - Determine if it is in the best interest of siblings to be placed together in a permanent home, taking into account their developmental and emotional needs, their attachment patterns, and sibling group dynamics.

Parent-Child Interaction Assessments - Assess a child's attachment to a caregiver, the appropriateness of the parenting style and whether it meets the developmental and emotional needs of a child, and make recommendations regarding the child's permanency needs.

Permanency and Needs Assessments - Assess a child's developmental and emotional functioning in relation to their permanency needs and provide recommendations for successful placement.

Parental Assessments - Assess a caregiver's parenting skills, their capacity to parent adequately on a long term basis, and their motivation to care for a child, and provide recommendations for supportive services as needed.

Medication Evaluation & Management
At times, some children benefit greatly from medication that targets specific behaviors, emotional disorders or physiological imbalances. Kinship House's Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner is available for medication evaluations and administration. We also consult with our Medical Director, Charlene Sabin, a nationally recognized Behavioral Pediatrician with extensive experience in attending to the medication needs of children, especially those who were exposed prenatally to drugs and/or alcohol, or with developmental delays.

Transition Services

Adoption Preparation
Counseling children dealing with grief and loss issues, and understanding the transition and adoption process.
Preparing children to look forward to moving to a permanent home
Providing counseling support for children's foster and/or adoptive families, and coordination with Department of Human Services, CASA's, attorneys, etc.
Appropriately acknowledging and integrating these important transitions and closures so children may move forward with their new lives.

Transition Planning and Support Services
Meeting with and advising the adoptive family of a child's special needs.
Introducing a child to their new family in a safe, supervised setting.
Providing post placement support as necessary for a child or family.
Facilitating shared parenting meetings with willing foster and birth parents to help birth parents preserve and strengthen their bonds with their children and develop their skills as mothers and fathers, and to help parents make the changes needed to heal and reunify their families.

Facilitation of Goodbye / Good Luck Visits
A goodbye or good luck visit is an opportunity for children to hear clear information from their parents about painful experiences they have had. Without this meeting, adopted children, for example, are left trying to make sense of why they could not return to their birth parents. When children figure things out on their own, they usually assign the blame, not on parents, but on themselves. We believe that it is important for children to know the truth and understand their feelings about previous disruptions before they move to their permanent homes.