April 2023 

Ongoing Training

May 9th, 2023 -  Insecure Attachment Disorders – Grahame Williams

Insecure attachment disorders in children are a common occurrence due to experiences of trauma. These two common diagnoses are Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) & Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder (DSED) - these disorders and more will be explored in the May training presented by Grahame Williams.

• Reactive Attachment Disorder is a condition in which individuals have difficulty in forming loving, lasting, intimate relationships. Attachment disorders vary in their severity, but the term is usually reserved for individuals who show a nearly complete lack of ability to be genuinely affectionate with others. They typically fail to develop a conscience and do not learn to trust.
• Disinhibited social engagement disorder involves socially aberrant behaviours such as wandering away from a care-giver, willingness to depart with a stranger, and engagement in overly familiar physical behaviours (e.g. seeking physical contact such as a hug) with unfamiliar adults.

Presented by Grahame Williams. Grahame has worked with children, adolescents and their parents/carers as a Care Manager, Adolescent Family Counsellor and Play Therapist for over 21 years. Grahame has worked in numerous settings including, youth centres, residential care, rural community, private sector and not-for-profit agencies which has provided him with a broad knowledge of issues facing children and parents/carers. Grahame has a passion for working with children from trauma backgrounds, children with attachment problems and suffering from anxiety. In recent years his focus has been around attachment-focused therapies such as Theraplay, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy and Trust Based Relational Intervention® for which he is an authorised TBRI® Practitioner.

Is your Working with Children Check due for renewal?

All Foster Carers and Household members over the age of 18 are required to have a NSW Working with Children Check (WWCC)

Friendly reminder that Working with Children Check’s expire after five years. You will be notified by Service NSW 3 months before its expiry, and you can renew your Check from this time. Ensure you renew your WWCC before it expires as it is illegal to be involved in child-related roles. In the instance Allambi Care do not obtain your or household members new WWCC clearance prior to the expiry, we are legally required to suspend your authorisation. Once Allambi Care is provided with your WWCC clearance, we can reinstate your authorisation.

If your WWCC is due to expire, a team member from Fostering & Permanency will contact you six weeks before the expiry date to ensure the renewal is actioned. Please provide your new WWC number to your Case Worker or email fostercareadministration@allambicare.org.au

Please reach out to the team if you need any assistance in obtaining your WWCC renewal.

Smoke Alarm Safety - for the winter ahead

Last winter there were 16 residential fire deaths across NSW, the highest death toll on record and four times the 2021 winter total of four. Of the 897 residential fires last winter, 45% of the homes didn’t have smoke alarms and 20% of homes had no smoke alarm at all. It’s a good idea to test and maintain your smoke alarms every year. A working smoke alarm provides a critical early warning, giving you and your family time to escape. It can take as little as three minutes for a fire to take hold and takes only two quick breaths of thick, black smoke to render someone unconscious. Fire and Rescue NSW recommends the following maintenance:

Every month: Smoke alarms should be tested (by pressing the test button) to ensure the battery and the alarm work.

Every six months: Smoke alarms should be cleaned with a vacuum cleaner. This will remove any dust or particles that could prevent the smoke alarm from working properly.

Once a year: If your smoke alarm has a battery, you should replace it annually. A good way to remember is to change it when you change your clocks at the end of Daylight Saving. If your smoke alarm uses a lithium battery, it is inbuilt into the alarm and cannot be replaced. The entire unit needs to be replaced every 10 years.

Every 10 years: Replace your smoke alarm. Smoke alarms do not last forever and the sensitivity in all smoke alarms will reduce over time. All types of smoke alarms should be removed, replaced and disposed of at least every 10 years.

Cosy up with a cup of tea and read the latest recommended book

Stranger Care By Sarah Sentilles

This book is set in Idaho, USA so although the OoHC system may be different, the sentiment is much the same as the foster care experience in Australia.

After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family - even if it means most likely having to give them back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.

"You were never ours," Sarah tells Coco, "yet we belong to each other."

A love letter to Coco, and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah's discovery of what it means to mother - in this case, not just a vulnerable infant, but the birth mother who loves her too. Ultimately, Coco's story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With "fearless, stirring, rhythmic" prose, Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story, with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect each other? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we're all related - tree, bird, star, person - how might we better live?

My Forever Family Events 

APR 26 – 7pm to 8pm | Online: Managing Bullying

This training aims to develop an awareness of bullying, its impacts and strategies we can use to support our children. Bullying can happen anywhere, like at school, at home or in the neighbourhood. It can be in person or can happen online and sometimes is obvious and other times hidden or subtle. Children with experiences of trauma are particularly vulnerable to bullying, so what can we do to better support them.

MAY 3 – 10am to 12pm | Online: My Life Story - Be honest, be real

This online training is aimed to promote, protect, and nurture each child and young person's individual life story. Every person has a life story. No two stories will ever be the same, but everyone is unique and worth capturing.

MAY 3 – 7pm to 8pm | Online: Surviving Placement Breakdown

Placements can break down for a number of reasons, sometimes no matter how hard we try as carers. It can be heart breaking, frustrating, and leave us with a world of feelings. So, how do we survive a placement breakdown and how do we, and those remaining in the household, repair from the experience.

MAY 9 – 10am to 11am | Online: Understanding Autism

Autism is a common diagnosis for children in care. This training explores what is autism, what causes autism, common problem behaviours and some top tips for parenting children and young people with autism, plus the importance of looking after yourself.

MAY 16 – 10am to 11am | Online:  The teen years, transition to adolescence

Heading into the teen years is a crucial time for growth and development for every child, but what about our children with experiences of trauma? We work through some of the big changes we can expect as our children enter the teen years and think about what reparative parenting approaches we can learn to better support them.

Whole Brain Strategy #4 

Use it or Lose it: Exercising the Upstairs Brain

Siegel and Bryson say that practicing using the upstairs brain is “the foundation of solid mental health.” For more information on the upstairs and downstairs brain read, Whole Brain Strategy #3: Engage, Don’t Enrage. Here are some examples that I paraphrased from The Whole-Brain Child of how to exercise the upstairs brain.

• • Give your child practice making choices
  • Let them experience consequences more natural than parent imposed

Controlling Emotions and Body:

• • Take a deep breath
  • Count to ten
  • Express their feelings - stomp their feet or punch a pillow

• • Ask questions
  • Why do you think you made that choice?
  • What made you feel that way?

• • • Draw attention to other people’s emotions

• • • Consistency takes time
    • Practice thinking through moral and ethical principles
    • Consider what behaviours you model

I’m pretty sure we spend most of our time dealing with choices, consequences and controlling emotions and the body. When we make it past breakfast choices without losing control of our emotions, it’s a good day. We have noticed with Elise that giving her the choice between two breakfast items goes much better than the open-ended question, “What do you want for breakfast?” (Breakfast just happens to be one of our optimal meltdown times.) While we practice our choices at breakfast, I am still waiting for Elise’s brain to get strong enough to choose to walk away from her little sister instead of taking her little sister’s toy. Until then, Elise’s arms will have the bite marks (natural consequence) to show she still needs practice, and sometimes Maggie might be sprawled out on the ground because Elise didn’t control her emotions or body.

But when I find Elise with bite marks or Maggie sprawled on the ground, it does present the perfect opportunity to ask, “Why do you think you made that choice? What made you feel that way?” And we are able explore empathy while little sister is crying though we don’t care much at the moment. I do my best to try to get some empathy when I’m feeling frustrated or stressed, but neither girl seems to empathise with me yet which does highlight how far away we are from morality. It would be awesome to have two girls who “make sound decisions while controlling themselves and working from empathy and self-understanding.” It seems too good to be true that girls will decide to do, “what is for the greater good beyond their own individual needs,” but they are only one and four years old. So we will keep exercising our brains through choices, consequences and controlling emotions and the body, and I will dream of the day one of my children empathises with me.