Attachment Foundations: Building Secure Bonds in Adoption and Foster Care (for Professionals)

Building secure attachments with children who have experienced separation, trauma, or loss can be challenging, but deeply rewarding. This webinar offers adoptive, foster, and kinship caregivers, as well as the professionals who support them, a practical and compassionate understanding of how early life experiences shape attachment, behavior, and relationships. The speaker will share evidence-based strategies to build felt safety, repair bonds, and strengthen connections over time, with a focus on supporting children struggling with attachment. The session also explores caregiver attachment styles and how self-awareness of these patterns can help parents strengthen bonds with their children. Participants will leave with actionable tools to foster secure, trusting connections at any stage of placement.

Susan K. Taylor, M.S. – Piedmont Coordinator, Consortium for Resource, Adoptive & Foster Family Training, Radford University

Course length: 120 minutes
Course level: Beginning, Intermediate
Certificate type: This course offers a Social Work CE certificate

Credit type: General CE

After attending this course, professionals will be able to:

• Describe how early experiences of separation, trauma, and loss can impact attachment, behavior, and relational patterns in foster and adopted children.
• Identify evidence-based strategies that support attachment and bonding for children with histories of trauma, with an emphasis on felt safety, connection, and repair.
• Explain how a caregiver’s attachment style may be impacted by stress and children’s attachment-related behaviors.
• Apply knowledge of caregiver attachment patterns to strengthen relational responses and support healing within the parent-child relationship.

Recorded 4/2/26

National Council For Adoption, #1804, is approved as an ACE provider to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 04/13/2026 – 04/13/2029. Social workers completing this course receive 2 general continuing education credits.

This course does not offer credit for NJ or NY social workers. More information on continuing education credits is available on the FAQs tab.