November is Adoption Awareness Month. At Lutheran Social Services of Illinois (LSSI), this is a time to honor the family connections created through adoption and to increase public awareness of adoption issues.
While adoption can be a beautiful way of building a family, adoption also involves loss and trauma. Children who are adopted lose their first families, and sometimes they lose ties to their culture or their country of origin. All adopted children have experienced the trauma of family separation. For youth adopted from foster care, they also experienced the trauma of abuse or neglect that led to them being removed from their biological parents.
Adoptive families deserve care and support. For parents who opened up their homes and hearts, and for youth who never asked for the losses that led to their adoptions, there can be challenges. These challenges could be family conflict, trauma reactions, grief, identity issues, and more. For adoptive parents who are dealing with big behaviors or other struggles with their children, parenting can become overwhelming.
When families go through hard times after adoption, LSSI’s Adoption Support and Preservation (ASAP) program is here to help. Our ASAP team includes therapists and mental health advocates who have specialized training in issues that commonly arise in adoptive families. Services are home- and community-based to help make them accessible to families. Services can include trauma-informed therapy, support groups, school advocacy, respite, and more. The ASAP program’s goal is to give adoptive families the help they need to heal and thrive.
All adoptive families in Illinois, including domestic private, intercountry, and foster care adoptions, as well as subsidized guardianship families, can receive services free of charge through Illinois ASAP programs. LSSI’s ASAP program serves Central Illinois in the following counties: Bureau, Fulton, Henderson, Henry, Knox, LaSalle, Logan, Marshall, Mason, McDonough, Mercer, Peoria, Putnam, Rock Island, Stark, Tazewell, Warren, and Woodford.
For more information about LSSI’s Adoption Support and Preservation Program, call 309.229.5437. You can also watch a brief video about our program here.
To learn more about the statewide network of ASAP agencies, check out the DCFS Path Beyond Adoption website.
