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Self-Injury Advanced Parenting Workshop Launches on FosterParentCollege.com®

March 13, 2017

Screen shot from Advanced Parenting Workshop on Self-Injury
Eugene, OR — Currently, 1 in 15 adolescents and young adults engage in chronic self-injury, that is, they cut, burn, bite, or hit themselves as a way to deal with distress, anger, or anxiety. To help resource parents understand how to support youth who deliberately harm themselves, FosterParentCollege.com has just released the online workshop, Self-Injury.

“When children purposefully self-injure, parents are understandably alarmed,” says Dr. Rick Delaney, instructor for the workshop. With the help of a young woman who has self injured, Dr. Delaney explores what self-injury is and what it means, the thoughts and feelings that may lead to self-injury, and how parents can respond to and support a child who self injures. This is followed by a family study of a teenager named Hannah, who has experienced trauma and secretly cuts herself. Workshop participants use interactive exercises to apply the strategies of trauma-informed parenting to respond to Hannah's needs.

Part of Foster Parent College's Advanced Parenting Workshop series, Self-Injury is a six-credit-hour, highly interactive, online course designed specifically for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents. It is available 24/7 on the FosterParentCollege.com website.

The creation of Self-Injury was made possible through a Small Business Innovation Research Grant (#R44 HD056645) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to Northwest Media, Inc., parent company of FosterParentCollege.com.

FosterParentCollege.com provides interactive, online training for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents. There are over 50 self-paced courses available at this time, including four additional courses in the Advanced Parenting Workshop series on anger, lying, noncompliance, and taking things. While courses on FosterParentCollege.com are targeted to resource parents, they can be useful to any family facing similar issues.

For more information about Self-Injury for resource parents contact Lee White at Lee@Northwestmedia.com.