What Is Adoption Medicine? (by NCFA)

Adoption Medicine: Improving the Health and Wellbeing of Adopted Children

By Dr. Emily Todd

First, let me answer the question on everyone’s mind: What is adoption medicine? Children who join families through adoption may have special health, behavioral, and developmental needs. Adoption medicine addresses those needs with the family in all phases of the adoption journey. Those of us in adoption medicine are typically pediatricians, but we have a variety of additional training beyond pediatrics, in areas such as genetics, infectious diseases, global health, and developmental or behavioral pediatrics. We apply our skills in all phases of the adoption journey – both before and long after an adoption to help children adopted via all types of adoption. Within the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), there exists the Council on Foster Care, Adoption, & Kinship Care (COFCAKC). This is a group of pediatricians with a special interest in adoption, kinship care, and foster care. These pediatricians are dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of children and youth in foster care and kinship care, as well as those who have been placed in permanent adoptive families.

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Attachment and Trauma in Early Childhood Presented by: Charles Zeanah, MD

Young children who experience serious adversity are at risk for long-term health and mental health difficulties. Serious adversity may result from absence of expectable environmental responsiveness, as in neglect and deprivation, or from presence of toxic stressors such as abuse or witnessing violence. In this session, we will consider both aspects of adversity, their effects on young children, and use in-depth case presentations to illustrate treatment approaches.

Dr. Charles Zeanah is the Sellars-Polchow Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Tulane University. He is also the Executive Director of the Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.

Dr. Zeanah’s academic interest has been in the area of infant mental health, particularly in understanding infants' development in the context of the infant-parent relationships. He conducts research on the effects of abuse, neglect, serious deprivation and exposure to violence on young children and on interventions designed to help them recover.

http://www.infantinstitute.org