Navigating Adoption: Relationships Across a Lifetime

Adoption professionals spend their days talking about adoption, building frameworks, and guiding others through the process, but lifelong experiences and relationships among adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents vary in complexity and are uniquely their own.

This online panel conversation brings together diverse voices from across the adoption community to explore the intricate, evolving connections between these groups of people. The panelists — an adoptee and her birth mother, an adoptee and her adoptive mother, and a sibling set that was adopted together through foster care — will explore how relationships shift over time, how to respectfully navigate communication and boundaries, and how to have tough conversations around identity, culture, and belonging. 

After attending this live webinar, participants will be able to:

• Analyze the lifelong emotional and psychological impacts of adoption from the distinct perspectives of birth parents, adoptive parents, adoptees, and siblings. 
• Examine current professional standards and communication practices surrounding open adoption to support healthy identity development. 
• Identify strategies to support families navigating complex adoption triad dynamics. 

Cost: FREE

Course level: Beginning, Intermediate

Certificate type: This course offers attendance, General Social Work CE, and NY Contact Hours certificates

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 1 general continuing education credit.