The Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children at Claremont McKenna College, directed by Professor of Psychology Diane Halpern, will co-sponsor Biology & Beyond: Siblings in Adoption and Foster Care, a conference March 16-17 on the CMC campus. The conference will explore a wide range of critical questions about siblings and adoption, including the shortage of families willing to adopt large sibling groups.
Halpern, Berger Institute director, and associate director Sherylle Tan, will join a panel of featured speakers scheduled to include authors, lecturers, and experts on adoption, family issues, and child welfare practices. Topics include: sibling relations in adoption and foster care, the importance of sibling bonds in the eyes of former foster children, the separation of siblings in the foster care and adoption process, and policy and law and the rights of siblings. A continental breakfast check-in opens the conference at 8 a.m. on Thursday, March 16, in Pickford Auditorium.
"For most of us," Halpern says, "The relationships we have with our siblings are the longest ones in our lives. These relationships are complex in traditional families, and even more so for children whose lives may consist of multiple family arrangements and disruption.
"Siblings can include the attached relationships that foster-siblings share without any biological ties, an assortment of half and distant' biological relationships, step-siblings, and according to some definitions even the relationships among children born from the same anonymous sperm donor."
The conference is co-sponsored by the Kinship Center in California and The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. Featured during conference workshops will be Madelyn Freundlich, an independent child welfare consultant and former policy director for Children's Rights in New York as well as past executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute and General Counsel for the Child Welfare League of America; Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute and a journalist who has written about adoption in The Boston Globe, as well as author of Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America; Wendy Piccus, author and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she works in the college's Center for Social Services Research; Sharon Roszia, a program manager with the Kinship Center in Santa Ana and coauthor of The Open Adoption Experience: A Complete Guide for Adoptive and Birth Families from Making the Decision Through the Child's Growing Years; and Michael Trout, director of the Infant-Parent Institute in Champaign, Ill., author and psychologist in private practice.
CMC's Halpern, an immediate past-president of the American Psychological Association, will discuss the complex nature of sibling relationships, with Tan addressing the issue of Separated Siblings: Terrible Impact or Great Relief?
For a complete conference agenda, and for further information about participating speakers, visit: http://berger.claremontmckenna.edu/