September 29, 2014
By: Gari Lister
Welcome to ATN’s new and expanded blog! We have been working the last several months to plan a more active – and hopefully interactive – blog that will become a real resource for all of us fighting in the trenches to help our children heal from trauma and attachment issues. As ATN’s Blog Manager, I am proud to share in this exciting effort, one of just many new ATN initiatives designed to help families and children. The most immediate of those initiatives, of course, is the Educating Traumatized Children Summit which begins tomorrow.
The Summit will bring together some of the country’s leading experts on how trauma affects our children and education, including how teachers can reach the traumatized children in their classrooms, and how parents can help their children succeed in school. And if the expertise taking part in the Summit didn’t sell you on joining, the price should — ATN is offering the Summit for FREE. We at the blog are proud to be able to help in this effort. We know that parents and teachers are busy, so ATN’s new Better and Bolder Blog will every day for the next ten days offer readers highlights from the day’s interviews. Our posts won’t be as good as the interviews — you REALLY don’t want to miss those — but hopefully they will help parents and teachers.
After the Summit, not only will we continue to share personal stories of our own challenges in our own individual voices, as we have done in the past; we also have developed new kinds of posts, all designed to provide support and education. A core component of this is what we are calling “Toolbox Tuesday.” On Tuesdays, we hope to offer solutions to some of the common challenges faced by families dealing with children along the healing journey. We will also highlight upcoming events in calendar entries, provide updates on legislative developments, and include book reviews, summaries of seminars and other useful information. We hope to post daily, so you will want to bookmark this page and check back often! Better yet, follow the blog and join ATN by using google plus in the upper right hand corner!
To accomplish these ambitious goals, we have recruited some of the most thoughtful people we know to join our blogging team. They have disparate backgrounds and points of view: what they have in common, though, is their dedication to helping families find healing. They are all experienced parents and fearless advocates:
- Craig Peterson is a dad (and a member of the Board of Directors of ATN) who blogs often on his own and has years of experience parenting traumatized children. In the next few weeks, you will read a series of posts on “Lessons Learned.”
- Jennie Murdoch is a social worker and therapist who has spent her the life educating herself on a wide range of therapies and techniques — everything from massage to neurofeedback to EMDR — which she uses to help children and families.
- David Kerrigan is also a social worker and therapist; he has worked with families for nearly 20 years and speaks on trauma-related issues around the country and the world.
- Linda Forsyth is a retired social worker and an experienced parent with two adult children adopted from foster care.
- Deb Novo is also an experienced parent who has spent years working with her adopted children and advocating for others.
- Melissa Sadin is a parent to a child with attachment issues, special education teacher and school administrator as well as a special education advocate.
So we hope to bring you, our readers, a variety of perspectives on the multiplicity of issues — parenting, therapy-related and educational — which families dealing with attachment and trauma face.
But we also welcome input! Let us know if there are things you want to learn more about. And also let us know if you are willing to volunteer — with a single guest post or on an ongoing basis.
