By Lubica Vyhnankova | Project Leader
This spring we spent a lot of time counselling, our centres were full of parent and child clients. We were working on personal history of adopted children. It is crucial for them to know as much as possible about their past and biological parents. We spend hours of time on firming their personality and positive identity and teaching their parents how to work on it at home.
Except of individual counselling in our regional centres, in May we organised three counselling weekends for adoptive and foster families, each of them in other region of Slovakia.
In the North of Slovakia our team from Zilina prepared a three day program with the topics according to the demand of parents. They spoke about spiritual dimension of parenting, they invited an expert on human brain and how it reacts to trauma and how parents can use the knowledge about brain when calming or challenging kids. More than 30 families were involved and expressed that it was very useful and encouraging.
In the East of Slovakia the team from Presov prepared a weekend in the heart of nature and spoke about the strenght of relationship in the healing proccess of the traumatised child. One of the aims of the weekend was relaxing time for foster and adoptive parents who are often in a risk of burn-out. Therefore our team of volunteers took care of the children so they let their parents relax.
The team from Banska Bystrica organised weekend in the middle of Slovakia, which was especially focused on adoptive and foster families who don´t have easily approachable services. The aim was to make an opportunity to know each other and networking. We believe that sometimes the relationships between people in similar situation can have better impact than hours of professional counselling. These families live in regions far from our centres and during the weekend they had an opportunity for individual counselling as well.
„We met the same people as we are. In our neighbourhood we feel alone and just a few friends understand us. We really want to be in touch with other adoptive families we met here. It gives us strength,“ said one of adoptive mother who was for the first time with us. We are very glad to prepare such opportunities for adoptive and foster families.
Thank you for keeping up with us. The project is managed by non-profit organization Návrat (Return).
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
