Explore a variety of movies that represent some of the family dynamics, circumstances, or themes that may relate to the work that you do as a CASA Advocate. The following are movies and documentaries that are currently streaming on Netflix and can count toward your continuing education hours. If you watch something that you think can count towards your hours but is not on this list, please feel free to let your supervisor know and suggest it to us.

  • Movies and documentaries count as 2 hours. Check in with your supervisor regarding credits for multiple TV show episodes.

  • To get credit for continuing education, report it to your supervisor or enter it in Optima as a Training Log.


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Traumatized, violent, and yearning for love, 9-year-old Benni bonds with a gruff mentor as a child services worker struggles to find her a home.

Netflix

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Fleeing in the night with Maddy, Alex seeks help from social services and lands a job with Value Maids, only to find her problems are just beginning.

Netflix

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A loyal sister struggles to stay afloat while driving her heroin-addicted brother to a detox center and looking after his 2-year-old daughter.

Netflix

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Hardened by years in foster care, a teenage girl from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood decides that joining the all-boys wrestling team is the only way back to her estranged father.

Netflix

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MOVIES

Ellen, a 20-year-old with anorexia nervosa, goes on a harrowing, sometimes funny journey of self-discovery at a group home run by an unusual doctor.

Netflix

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A documentary that explores how drugs like Adderall offer students, athletes, coders, and others a way to do more, faster, in better in a hyper-competitive world.

Netflix

A boy's brutal murder and the public trials of his guardians and social workers prompt questions about the system's protection of vulnerable children.

Netflix

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From nature to nurture, this docuseries explores the groundbreaking science that reveals how infants discover life during their very first year.

Netflix

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Using breakthroughs in technology and neuroscience, this series examines how the environment affects infants – and how infants can affect our future.

Netflix

Five-year-old Saroo gets lost on a train that takes him thousands of miles across India, away from home and family. Saroo must learn to survive alone in Kolkata before ultimately being adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty-five years later, armed with only a handful of memories, his unwavering determination, and a revolutionary technology known as Google Earth, he sets out to find his lost family and finally return to his first home.

Netflix

In this documentary, an anguished couple in Florida battles authorities for custody of their ailing daughter after being accused of child abuse.

Netflix

In this eye-opening documentary exposé, teens and parents reveal disturbing accounts of abuse and exploitation within the world of child influencers.

Netflix

In this two-part documentary, a tenacious mother unravels the complex mystery surrounding the 1989 disappearance of the daughter she placed for adoption.

Netflix

Just Say No' was a slogan. This is a revolution. GENERATION FOUND is a powerful story about one community coming together to ignite a youth addiction recovery revolution in their hometown.

Amazon Prime

A 17-year-old girl whose mother is addicted to drugs fights to adopt her three younger brothers after their mother lands in jail.

Peacock

The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. We learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. The story is also available as a book.

Netflix