Therapeutic support during Covid-19 For Adoptive Families

The government has allocated an additional £8m to the ASF specifically to support adoptive families who have mental health needs arising specifically from the impact of Covid-19 and the related lockdown. This support is envisaged to include virtual peer-to-peer support, access to helplines, couples’ therapy and online counselling.

The pandemic is impacting on all aspects of life with many families facing financial insecurity, decreased social support with social distancing and increased isolation, and so there is growing concern about the impact of already vulnerable members of society notably adoptive families. Cherrycroft continues to offer therapeutic support for adoptive families that we are already working with, and the form and nature of that support that this work is taking is a bespoke collaboration between therapist and the family.

In addition to this Cherrycroft is offering support to other adoptive families in this unique situation. All our sessions are online using Zoom, Skype or WhatsApp.

What We are Offering

Groups

For all group work there is an initial individual screening session so that we can get to meet the parents of families that are new to us and start to build a relationship with them. This also helps us to understand the issues facing the family and whether or not group work is best or if they are more suited to individual work – or if they need a combination of individual and group work. These are closed groups so that parents can develop a sense of being a group member and it can be hard to open up if the people in the group keep changing

  • Parent-support groups – these groups will run weekly on specific topics which include: coping with home schooling, mental health and wellbeing for parents, mental health and wellbeing for adopted children, relating to adolescents during Covid-19
  • Groups for adolescents
  • Groups for older children
  • Group parent-child Theraplay

Individual support

  • Therapeutic parenting support – these are with an assigned therapist and parents
  • Parent-child attachment-based therapy – these tend to be highly structured sessions that are shorter in length than face to face sessions. We usually have a parent session to talk about the week has been using an attachment/trauma model, strategies on how to cope with this at home and to plan the session
  • Individual mental health support

Monitoring and reviewing our work

Monitoring and reviewing is a very important part of our work. We usually ask parents and adolescents (and teachers when they are at school) to complete our mental health questionnaires and we repeat these at varying intervals to monitor progress. We have questionnaires that are particular to the current situation.

Process

For Post Adoption Social Workers:

  1. Dr Claudia Wilson is available for telephone call discussions about families from 11.00 to 1pm Monday to Friday – Tel no. 01276 301010 (alternatively, email Dr Wilson (cw@cherrycroft.pro) to arrange a different time to talk)
  2. If it is agreed that the work should go ahead then we complete the relevant paperwork and ASF funding application
  3. Work is scheduled with the family
  4. Review

For Adoptive families

You can either get your local Post Adoption Social Worker to contact us in the process above or you can call Dr Claudia Wilson for a telephone discussion between 11am and 1pm, Monday to Friday to ensure that ours is the service you would like to access. Your local Post Adoption Social Worker/Post Adoption Team will need to arrange for funding through the ASF. We can also accept families who can self-fund, since we are registered with Ofsted as an Adoption Support Agency

Please feel free to talk to us about your needs. This is an unprecedented time and so we are looking at ways of building in bespoke types of support.

Best wishes,
Dr Claudia Wilson
Clinical Psychologist