Jennie Owens

Jennie has worked with children of all ages for over 20 years and is the author of Dancing with a Porcupine, a real life parable about living successfully as the parent of special needs children. In addition to her MA in Education, Jennie has received extensive training in therapeutic parenting, trauma, and attachment in adoption. She has worked in multiple group home settings with abused and abandoned children and in several settings providing support for foster and adoptive parents, including doing foster parent Recruitment and Retention through Fostering Together and working as a foster parent trainer for the state through the Alliance for Child Welfare Excellence.

Most of Jennie?s experience, however, comes from the fact that she and her husband adopted three foster children nine years ago, who were 8, 10 and 10 when they came to live with them. All of her children have progressed leaps and bounds further than professionals ever expected, and now as teenagers they continue to provide her with on-the-job training every day.

Along with training foster parents, Jennie provides coaching services through Canyon Lakes Family Counseling for parents wanting to find more effective ways to parent challenging children, as well as parents who have experienced their own trauma through parenting them. Jennie is currently working on a book called ?Dancing with a Porcupine.? It chronicles her challenging experiences in parenting their children and her journey back to health and sanity after being told by a medical professional, ?If you don?t get rid of your stressors, you?re going to die.?

Jennie speaks at adoption and foster care conferences, retreats and workshops and leads foster and adoptive mom retreats. If you?d like to contact her about speaking at an event, please email her at jennie@foreverhomes.org.