The Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency Workbook for Children and Teens

This unique, important workbook provides tools, knowledge and insights that every professional (and parent) should have to help children and teens overcome their challenges and enhance their lives. I cannot recommend it highly enough. – Adam Pertman, president of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency, author of “Adoption Nation”Essential in working with teens and children impacted by adoption or the foster care system. An invaluable resource in integrating their lived experience around attachment, loss and identity in practical and profoundly healing ways. – DeeDee Mascarenas, LMFT, Psychotherapist, Keynote Presenter, TrainerWith great sensitivity and expertise, Allison Davis Maxon guides children and teens through a series of therapeutic activities and exercises tailored to their unique emotional needs. This workbook is a self-guided tool that provides strategies to gently explore their trauma, allowing healing to regain a sense of control and self-esteem. – Mary M. McGowan, Executive Director ATTACh.org

Allison Davis Maxon has created a unique, strength-based, and culturally sensitive workbook to assist children and teens in examining their Seven Core Issues. It is the third publication about the Seven Core Issues meant to enlighten, empower, and offer a roadmap to healing. All children separated from their families of origin have a trauma, even if it occurs right after birth. Many children have additional traumas based on subsequent moves and losses. Most of these traumas occurred at a pre-verbal time in a child’s life but are remembered in the body. They need to be teased out through the types of exercises this workbook offers. The workbook is a tool to empower children who have experienced foster care, adoption, and relative care. Often children and teens’ voices have been unheard, leaving their parents and professionals without the true knowledge needed to address and heal childhood wounds or to respond to child and teens’ concerns and questions. Through the use of the tools in the workbook, attachments are deepened, and healing can occur.

Allison Davis Maxon, M.S., LMFT, is an expert in the fields of child welfare and children’s mental health specializing in attachment, developmental trauma, and permanency/adoption. She is the executive director for the National Center on Adoption and Permanency and was the child welfare consultant on the Paramount Pictures movie ‘Instant Family’. Allison was honored in 2017 with the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute ‘Angels in Adoption’ award and is the co-author of Seven Core Issues in Adoption and Permanency.