Adoption-Specific Therapy in Practice

The process for adopting children, especially older children, can often bring a mix of feelings for both parents and child: happiness, anxiety, confusion, sadness and loss, and children may experience significant behavioral and emotional distress. Adoptive families can be helped by adoption-specific therapy that takes into account the child's past trauma and placement history, recognizing that current behavioral issues may have been adaptive in a previous traumatic, chaotic, or neglectful context.

In this program, Dr. Jill Waterman demonstrates the initial parent session of ADAPT, a manualized therapeutic approach that combines evidence-based treatments for children and families with best practices from the attachment and adoption literature. In ADAPT, both parents and children are seen for treatment individually and jointly.

In this video, Dr. Waterman demonstrates this approach with a young mother who has a 5-year-old adopted son.