Hundreds of New Brunswick children are permanently under the care of the province.
The New Brunswick Adoption Foundation works to find forever families for those kids.
Executive Director Suzanne Kingston said most of their team has adopted kids from care and they want to learn what families and kids need.
“The one setting that is incredibly challenging for them probably more than other settings is school because school is set up in a way where kids have to really kind of fit in,” Kingston said.
Funding from the Atlantic Lottery Corporation allowed the Adoption Network to book a leading expert on trauma-informed schools, Heather T. Forbes, for another webinar.
“We had over 200 people registered for this program. Many of them who work in the school system, many of them who are parents and many who are adoptees themselves that participated and got to watch this webinar around how we can continue doing practices that are sensitive to kids with trauma,” Kingston said.
As of September 2022, 649 children were under the permanent care of the province.
It includes 71 children under the age of two, 91 between the ages of three and five years old, 161 who are six to 10 years old, 155 between the ages of 11 to 14, and 171 teenagers between 15 and 18 years old.
Kingston said if a child comes into care at the age of 10, it’s likely because things were going ok and then something happened.
“When you think about a 10-month-old baby that’s going into care, they had 10 months probably of this very difficult journey and those 10 months when you are a newborn are way more damaging than 10 months when you are 10 years old,” Kingston said.
Kingston said they want to get kids into healthy homes as early as possible.
A webinar entitled “While You Are Waiting” will be held on Monday night for people waiting or considering adopting children from the New Brunswick child welfare system.
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