Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.ED
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Live Webinar
10 am – 12 pm (ET)
2 CECs
Registration fee: $50
10% Discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current UConn SSW Field Instructors
Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.
As social workers, we tend to have limited training in the grief of children. How they cognitively and psychologically understand loss is often omitted from our core learning objectives. For children in foster or residential or alternative care, the research is even more limited. This webinar will focus on the specific bereavement and grief experiences of children in alternative care. We will explore how a child, to even “be” in alternative care, is to be a griever. Any alternative care for a child, by its very definition, requires that the child in care has either lost a family member(s) to actual death or another form of loss that often feels like a death.
How have we systemically viewed these grieving children? Are we more likely to diagnose their expressions of grief as negative behaviors? Can the most oppositional child we treat be among the most bereaved children we have encountered?
This webinar will examine children in alternative care as disenfranchised grievers. We will address the bereavement needs that so often, and unintentionally, go untreated. We will also explore why this grief has been systemically undertreated due to a system that was never given adequate resources to address the bereavement needs of these children.
Participants will:
- be able to identify the common symptoms of grief experienced by children in care
- be able to identify how grief manifests in behavioral symptoms
- learn positive interventions to address grief and loss issues of children in alternative care
