On January 26, 2016 the Children's Behavioral Health Knowledge Center hosted a webinar on developmental issues and challenges in adoption. This webinar offered information about the developmental stages that adopted (and emotionally adopted) children experience in a slightly different way than children raised in the families they were born into.  This is a resource for families, providers, and professionals looking to better understand and serve children in an adoption sensitive and competent manner.

Download a copy of the presentation slides.

Presenter: Joyce Maguire Pavao, Ed.D, LCSW, LMFT, is an internationally noted consultant and coach on child welfare, adoption, team building, and training. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and has consulted for various public and private child welfare agencies, adoption agencies, schools, and community groups, as well as probate and family court judges, lawyers, and clergy.  Additionally, she has worked closely with individuals, couples, and families with adoption-related issues, foster care issues, guardianship and kinship, as well as complex families formed through reproductive technology, single parent families, gay and lesbian families, and families through remarriage. She has developed models for treatment and for training using her systemic, intergenerational, and developmental framework The Normative Crises in the Development of the Adoptive Family (Family Therapy News, 1982) and her book The Family of Adoption (Beacon Press, 1998, 2005) has received high acclaim. Dr. Pavao has received many awards and honors, including the Children's Bureau/U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Adoption Excellence Award for Family Contribution (2003) and the Congressional Coalition on Adoption award for Angels in Adoption (2000).