MPCP has long been committed to supporting adoptive parents and we have just delivered an 8-week MBCT curriculum online to adoptive parents serviced by the Adoption West Consortium. We called the course 'Caring for Me, Caring for You' to make the all important link between our own wellbeing and our ability to care for others.
Jacky and Emma taught the first face to face course for adoptive parents in 2018, but it has been difficult getting further courses off the ground. Adoptive parents find it hard to commit to an 8-week course out of the home and adoption services are under a degree of pressure that makes considering and planning new initiatives really difficult. Additional Covid 19 funding was made available to Adoption West Consortium earlier this year, however. This provided the opportunity for managers there and for us to agree to trial an online mindfulness course to see if this mode of delivery could support adoptive parents caring for some of the country’s most vulnerable children.
The course was very positively received: we are now confident that we can deliver mindfulness in a sensitive and meaningful way online. For this group of ‘hard to reach' parents, geographically dispersed and juggling care and work, online mindfulness courses may well be the way forward. Following this success (report available), we are now delivering a second course.
In addition to this, Adoption West has asked us to provide 6-weekly “Mindfulness Top Up” sessions over the next year to support the practice of adoptive parents in the Consortium who have completed a course or have another meditation practice. This is ground-breaking work and we are incredibly grateful to Adoption West for giving us this opprtunity to explore how mindfulness can support to adoptive parents in these extarordinarily difficult times.