Training:

The Cost of Becoming a Boy: Trauma, Masculinity, and Better Engaging Boys in our Work

Dec 8
Tuesday, December 8, 2026 – 7:00am
7:00am - 9:00am

Audience: All Caregivers (Adoptive, Foster & Kinship Parents)

Level: Intermediate
Ages addressed: 18 and under

Boys in foster care experience disproportionately high rates of trauma, loss, and adversity, yet many struggle to express these experiences in ways that helping professionals recognize. Too often, their pain is mislabeled as defiance, aggression, emotional withdrawal, or lack of engagement. This workshop explores how trauma intersects with masculinity, shaping the ways boys communicate distress, form relationships, and seek safety.

Drawing on more than 25 years of clinical practice with boys in foster care, juvenile justice, and residential treatment, Dr. McCormick examines the hidden emotional costs of traditional masculinity and how socialization often disconnects boys from vulnerability, emotional awareness, and authentic connection. Participants will gain a trauma-informed framework for understanding behaviors such as anger, risk-taking, emotional shutdown, and defensiveness as adaptive survival strategies rather than simply behavioral problems.

Grounded in neuroscience, attachment theory, and developmental trauma research, this workshop offers practical strategies for building trust, increasing engagement, and fostering resilience in boys who have experienced significant adversity. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how to create emotionally safe relationships that support healing, accountability, and healthy development.

Participants will learn to:

  • Understand how trauma and masculine socialization influence boys' emotions, behaviors, and relationships.
  • Recognize common trauma adaptations that are often misunderstood as defiance, aggression, or disengagement.
  • Apply trauma-informed strategies to strengthen engagement and therapeutic relationships with boys.
  • Foster emotional literacy, healthy masculinity, and resilience while supporting accountability and connection.
  • Develop practical approaches for working more effectively with boys in foster care and other child-serving systems.

Register Here

Location:

Foster Adopt Minnesota - Webinar

https://www.fosteradoptmn.org/

Adam McCormick, PhD, is a Professor of Social Work at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where he teaches in both the Social Work and Master of Counseling programs. His work focuses on childhood trauma, emotional survival adaptations, authenticity, burnout, masculinity, and the inner lives of helping professionals.

He is the author of the NASW Press book Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood, which explores how childhood trauma and emotional survival roles continue shaping the lives and work of therapists, social workers, counselors, and other helping professionals. He is the author of LGBTQ Youth in Foster Care: Empowering Approaches to Inclusive Care (Routledge) and is currently authoring a forthcoming book exploring the hidden emotional and developmental costs of boyhood and masculinity.