Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Marriage or Partnership (While Raising Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children)

Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks! Raising kids impacted by adoption, foster care, or kinship care can do a number on your marriage or life partnership. Join us for a conversation with Jeremy & Jara Walden, authors of The Heart Work of Foster Care: A Hopeful and Honest Guide to Foster Parenting , about strategies to re-prioritize and strengthen your most significant relationship. In this episode, we discuss: How can raising kids together enhance a marriage or relationship? Why are kids in our community often harder to parent? Trauma, loss, neglect Prenatal substance exposure Challenging behaviors that come from those experiences Why and how might our kids’ needs test our adult relationships? What are some of the additional stressors our relationships may face when fostering or adopting kids who’ve been exposed to trauma? What are some challenging behaviors kids who’ve experienced trauma can bring that might be particularly difficult for the marriage? What are some signs that we may be neglecting or at least not maintaining our significant relationship? How does your history impact your marriage, while raising kids with trauma impacts? Can you offer specific strategies for “going back,” healing, or re-prioritizing our marriages or partnerships if we are listening to this and realize we haven’t done so? How do single parents prioritize the adult relationships that they value? Support the show Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by . We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content: Weekly podcasts Weekly articles/blog posts Resource pages on all aspects of family building

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Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Marriage or Partnership (While Raising Adopted, Foster, or Relative Children) is an episode from Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care by Creating a Family.

This episode is 59:05 long.

This episode was published on Mar 25, 2026.

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