My Brown Boy: May 2022

Ten Important Things Foster and/or Adoptive Parents Should Know

by Elizabeth Randolph, MSN, Ph.D

4.0 Hours Training Credit

© This material is copyrighted and may not be redistributed without the express written permission of FCAC.

Introduction

Every year tens of thousands of US citizens travel to other countries in order to adopt children, or else choose to adopt children (or to become foster parents to children) who were born in the US . In most cases, these parents have been abysmally ill-prepared for this task by the adoption and social service agencies with which they are working, and so, for most of these parents, the transition of these new children into the home can be challenging at best, and horrific at worst. We don't call the places in the US where we send children who have been removed from the custody of their birth parents “orphanages.” We call them “receiving homes,” or “transitional homes,” or other such names that sound so much nicer than “orphanages.” But we need to admit to ourselves what the truth really is for our children. We send our children to live in orphanages for a period of time after they are removed from the custody of their birth parents, and/or when they have been kicked out of one foster home, and are awaiting placement in another one, or have been kicked out of one group home or residential treatment setting, and are awaiting placement in another one. I have known a great many children who have spent as long as three years in a “receiving home” before a more permanent placement can be found for them. If this isn't living in an orphanage, I don't know what is. Thus, there can be little doubt that these children have lived in orphanages in the US, and that not all foster and adoptive children come from orphanages from overseas.

Most children who live in orphanages, whether in the US or overseas, have experienced severe neglect, and physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their birth parents (and often many friends of those birth parents) for many years before being removed from the custody of those birth parents. The exception to this is the children who are placed in orphanages at birth, or within a few days of birth. In addition, a great many children report having been sexually abused by older children, and/or engaging in frequent sex play with same-age peers in American orphanages (this is also a frequent occurrence in foreign orphanages). Thus, when most children embark upon foster care and/or adoption, they usually do so with more scars (often deeply hidden scars) than most adults can even begin to imagine that these children are carrying, and so children come to foster and adoptive homes very poorly equipped to be able to be healthy and productive members of a family. This is why I refer to these children as having been severely traumatized, and this is why it's so extremely important that potential foster and adoptive parents are aware of these facts before they bring these children into their homes.

The purpose of this course is to provide current and potential foster and adoptive parents with ten things that they need to know, and that they can do, that will help to make it far easier for them to have foster and adoptive children in their homes. The first things that are important for parents to know involve developing an understanding of the ways that severe traumatization impacts children, and how this can sometimes lead to serious behavior problems for children. These impacts include neurological, physiological, neurochemical, and psychological effects, and it isn't possible to deeply cover this information in this lesson. However, there are several other courses available on this website that do provide in-depth information about these impacts on children, and I recommend that you seek out these other courses for more in-depth information on these topics than can be provided in this course alone.

In this lesson, I'll provide only a brief overview of the problems that severely traumatized children nearly always have. First of all, the brains of these children are nearly always under-developed in specific areas, particularly in the mid-brain, corpus callosum, amygdalar, caudate nuclei, and frontal lobe areas of the brain. Many of these children also have actual brain damage as a result of pre-natal drug and alcohol exposure, although this damage isn't usually large enough to be seen on a CAT scan, MRI, PET scan, or SPECT scan. These neurological problems often create speech delays and oddities of speech, learning disabilities (although many of these children are quite intelligent), and highly distorted thinking of the type that is commonly called “psychotic thinking.” Having this type of thinking doesn't necessarily mean that these children will become schizophrenic, but the research that I have done for over 15 years with severely traumatized children has clearly and repeatedly shown that over 2/3 of severely traumatized children have seriously distorted ways of viewing and interacting with the world around them, and over 40% of these children have frankly psychotic thinking most of the time, and especially when they're having symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Because of immaturity, and sometimes damage, to the mid-brain, over half of severely traumatized children appear to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which is usually a biochemical disorder, and so which is easily treated with medication. However, when these symptoms are caused by damage and immaturity in the mid-brain, medication is usually ineffective, or only minimally effective, in managing what appear to be symptoms of ADHD in these children.

Severely traumatized children, because they aren't picked up and moved around very often, don't develop a pathway in the brain that takes emotional input from the amygdali to the back of the frontal lobes to be processed. Since the amygdali process primarily fear and rage once children are one year of age, this means that severely traumatized children have limited ability to manage and modulate (lessen) their emotions, and that all of their emotions become colored with fear and rage, with the result that they often become unexpectedly overly rageful or fearful in ways that can be difficult for parents to understand. The brain has two areas that connect the amygdali to the back of the frontal lobes so that joy and pleasure can be sent to the frontal lobes to be processed, and these are called the caudate nuclei, or more simply, the caudates. Many severely traumatized children “hijack” the caudates (because they have no other way to get emotional input to the back of the frontal lobes) to send their negative emotions to the back of the frontal lobes. What this means is that these children have an extremely limited (if any) ability to experience joy and pleasure in their lives, and so feel miserable most of the time. Their misery can be easily misinterpreted as being depression, but very few of these children have a positive response to treatment with anti-depressant medications, most likely because they aren't really depressed. And, because misery loves company, and because these children have no way to experience joy and pleasure, many of these children prefer to act in ways that make others around them miserable as well. As a result, they often ruin family fun and activities, and don't understand themselves why they do this.

From a neurochemical perspective (the chemicals in people's brains), severely traumatized children experience nearly constant very high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their brains, as they almost never relax, and are hyper-alert to danger in their lives. Cortisol as a molecule has a number of differently shaped, if you will, “male appendages” that can insert themselves into the receptor sites for a wide variety of neurochemicals. Because these receptor sites are already full of cortisol, there is no room in them for the neurochemicals that are supposed to be able to attach there (things like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, among a wide variety of others). As a result, the brains of severely traumatized children are limited in their ability to respond appropriately to a wide variety of life situations because they lack the necessary neurochemicals to be able to respond appropriately. This is also one of the reasons why these children don't respond well to antidepressants that work based upon blocking neuroreceptor sites from “re-uptaking” certain neurochemicals (Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Effexor, etc). High levels of cortisol also make it very difficult for brain cells to develop properly, and so contribute to the immaturity that's present in the brains of severely traumatized children.

From a physiological perspective, the bodies of severely traumatized children are also influenced by chronically high levels of cortisol. Eventually these very high levels of cortisol will result in a break-down of the immune systems of these children, but they tend to be remarkably healthy as young children, for reasons that are poorly understood. They tend to avoid getting the diseases that other family members are passing around among each other. One hypothesis about this has to do with their tending to have a stronger constitution, as weaker children who get severely neglected and abused simply die. However, there is no way to know if this is actually the reason why these children seem to be inordinately healthy. There is a tendency for these children to experience precocious puberty, most likely as a result of chronically high levels of cortisol, and this is especially true for children adopted from overseas, most likely because of the hormones in American meat that they are suddenly exposed to, as European and Asian countries don't use the hormones and antibiotics in raising their meat animals as the US does. Thus, it's not at all unusual for children from Russia and Romania to start puberty within six to twelve months of arriving in the US.

From a psychological perspective, virtually all severely traumatized children have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that ranges in severity from fairly mild to quite severe. The events that trigger PTSD for them are highly unpredictable, and often aren't picked up on by parents, as most of these children either become overly withdrawn and freeze, or act-out in some way, when they experience PTSD. As will be discussed in greater detail later in this lesson, about 90% of these children have a very distorted sense of what healthy attachment consists of, lack a healthy ability to engage in reciprocal interactions with others (and many of these children have absolutely no concept for basic reciprocal interactions with others), and commonly misunderstand and misinterpret the actions of others. As mentioned above, they often have great difficulty experiencing pleasure and joy, and so can appear to be depressed, and are usually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Also as mentioned above, a very high percentage of these children have seriously distorted (or even frankly psychotic) thinking, and about half of them have what used to be called Childhood (or Juvenile or Pediatric) Bipolar Disorder, which is now being called a Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (NOS). In addition, research has shown that close to 75% of severely traumatized children are highly anxious most of the time, usually about non-specific topics, and so have what is called a Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Finally, the vast majority of these children have a very negative self-image, and they tend to believe that they are “pond scum” and worthless, despite the fact that they are also often quite omnipotent, believing that they have abilities and intelligence far beyond what they actually have (something called grandiosity).

Thus, some severely traumatized children have a wide variety of problems that make it difficult for them to fit easily into a foster or adoptive family, and about 40% of them have very serious behavior problems and totally lack any reciprocal behaviors. However, this doesn't mean that parents should shy away from bringing these children into their family. What's important is that parents know BEFORE these children join their family what kinds of problems these children are likely to have, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, are prepared with things that they can do to help make the transition of these children into their family easier (notice I didn't say “easy,” but “easier”), and can have more compassion for these children as they struggle as best they can at any given point in time on any given day. For it's vitally important for the foster/adoptive parents of these children to keep in mind the usually absolutely horrific early life experiences that these children managed to survive, and to remember that these children are simply doing the very best that they can dealing with PTSD, an immature brain, a very low sense of self-esteem, and a deep conviction that they can't rely on any adults to help them out with their problems. Changing this deeply held belief is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish, although many people have devoted their lives to helping children to accomplish this. In fact, it's often helpful for parents to take a good look at themselves in the mirror, and to ask themselves, “If I'd had to live through what this child lived through, would I be doing any better in my life”? Since the honest answer to this question for nearly everyone, if not everyone, is a frank no, this makes it far easier for foster and adoptive parents to have more compassion for the children they bring into their families.

However, before we explore the ten things that all foster and adoptive parents need to know, there is one very important thing that I strongly encourage all foster and adoptive parents to do, even if you're experienced “old hands” at being foster/adoptive parents. In fact, I'd like to make it a requirement for all foster/adoptive parents, but especially as a pre-requisite for all people who are just embarking upon the task of being foster or adoptive parents. That task is this:

Go out and rent and watch a movie called “MARTIAN CHILD.”

This is the story of a little boy in the foster care system who has a number of behavior problems which have resulted in his being returned repeatedly by foster parents. He concludes that, since none of the foster parents want to keep him, he must be from Mars. The movie revolves around the efforts of his latest foster parent to help him learn to become a member of a family. Watching this movie should greatly help foster and adoptive parents to be able to develop a better understanding of the challenges faced by children whose early life experiences were significantly different from the early life experiences of most of the rest of us, and why this makes it so difficult for some children to successfully transition to living in a family who takes a completely different view of the world than these children had while living in orphanages, or in foster homes. It's also a very touching movie that your entire family should enjoy (except, of course, for family members who are unable to enjoy anything, which might include some of your foster/adoptive children).
THE TEN THINGS THAT ARE MOST IMPORTANT FOR POTENTIAL FOSTER AND ADOPTIVE PARENTS TO KNOW (even if you already have foster/adoptive children in your home):
1) Trying to Make the Child's Adjustment to Your Family Too Quickly, and Giving the Child Too Many Things, Are Major Parenting Errors

Probably the most common error that prospective foster and adoptive parents make is the desire to try to make it up somehow to the children who they plan to foster or adopt for the bad things that have previously happened in the lives of those children. This error often plays out in a belief on the part of prospective parents that they are going to be able to give these children all of the things that those children never had before. As a result, prospective parents will go out and buy lots of new bedroom furniture, will buy lots of new clothes for their children when those children come home with them, and will do their best to have their home be as clean and spotless as possible for when those children arrive. What these parents have forgotten about is that children don't see the world in the same way that adults do. For one thing, children younger than about 6 walk around seeing the world at the crotch level of most adults. They have to look up constantly in order to be able to see the faces of the adults around them, and to communicate with those adults. For children who have been sexually abused (and this will be true for many of the children in foster care or who are eligible for adoption in the US, and will also be true for many orphanage children, as sexual acting-out between children is very common in orphanages, both overseas and in the orphanages in the US) just being out in public and walking around at crotch level can trigger severe symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which will usually cause children to start acting-out, as they don't have any other means for managing their symptoms of PTSD.

In addition, prospective foster and adoptive parents need to keep in mind what the orphanages and homes of the birth parents were like. They usually reek to high heaven of urine (and often vomit and feces as well). Children's beds were often simply a mattress on the floor with a blanket (no sheets or pillow). If children had any bedroom furniture, it was usually old, scratched up, and often had parts or pieces missing. I have been in many, many homes of birth parents where there are stacks of dirty diapers in every corner of the house, where there is old food (often months-old food) all over the floor, where there is animal urine and feces all over the floor, and where it's extremely cold, yet babies are toddling around clad only in a dirty diaper. These homes are so disgusting, and smell so horribly, that the social worker who I called in order to investigate severe neglect couldn't even stand to go inside (and yet often didn't even remove the children from this situation). My basic rule of thumb is that, if a place is so disgusting that I can't stand to go inside, no children should have to live there. So, when parents take children into foster or adoptive care from such environments, they (the parents) need to keep in mind that a clean home with really nice furniture, clean clothes, and healthy food are very strange experiences for their new children.

In addition, children who are adopted from overseas aren't thinking to themselves “Oh, goody, goody — I get to go to the land of the free and the home of the brave." No way!! What they're experiencing is that they've been taken away from everything that's familiar to them by people who speak a different language which they don't understand at all, and who smell funny. They essentially feel kidnaped by their new parents, who often feed them food that they've never seen or tasted before, and which they don't like because it's so strange to them. They're thinking that their new home smells funny; they don't know what to do with sheets on their beds (and so often take them off, tear them up, or just throw them on the floor); and they often have no idea what to do with clean towels, a washcloth, soap, eating utensils, or brand-new bedroom furniture (and so they often damage this furniture so that it looks more like the furniture that they had in the orphanage, or in their birth homes).

A number of these children will also urinate on the floor so that their room smells more like where they used to live. In general, a number of foster and adoptive children are quite destructive, although about a quarter of them will do this in lesser ways. They often engage in highly unusual behaviors like constantly picking at their scabs (and some of them will even save the scabs, or the blood from having picked at those scabs, in a jar in their closet); refusing to bathe, brush their teeth, comb their hair, and/or change their clothes on a regular basis; tear up and destroy their own possessions (and sometimes the possessions of others); and otherwise treating themselves in highly abusive and neglectful ways that are similar to the ways that they were treated by their birth parents. In fact, many of these children are quite expert at quickly figuring out the things that they can do that will upset their foster/adoptive parents the most, and those are the behaviors that they will engage in the most. This can be extremely upsetting and frustrating for parents, as they simply don't understand why their foster/adoptive children would want to do things to hurt or irritate them, as they're being as kind and loving as they can be toward these children. So, it's important for foster/adoptive parents to keep in mind that many severely traumatized children aren't reasonable and logical people. Instead, they are unreasonable and illogical people. As a result, parenting them in a reasonable and logical manner simply doesn't make any sense. What seems to work better is when parents are surprising and illogical when they interact with these children. Many parents protest this idea, as they wonder how their foster and adoptive children are ever going to learn how to behave appropriately. This topic will be discussed further later in this course, and is discussed in great depth in the series of courses on parenting traumatized children that are also available on this website.

And so, foster/adoptive parents will usually find it easier for their new children to adjust to living with their family if they purchase bedroom furniture, clothing, and toys from a second-hand store to start out with. As time goes by, and these children learn to adapt to living with their new family, foster/adoptive parents can begin purchasing new items, and nice items for these children (although some of these children will never be able to tolerate having nice things). Parents also need to be prepared for the fact that many of these children will pick constantly at their clothes, until they are full of holes, and so it makes far more sense to purchase inexpensive clothing items for these children, at least until they begin to show reciprocal interactions with their parents, to follow their parents when they go places (instead of just wandering off), and to do most of what they're asked to do most of the time. Foster and adoptive parents also need to keep in mind that it will take these children some time to adjust to new foods, new smells, new expectations, new rules, usually new religious beliefs, and new expectations for how they will behave. They need several months, and sometimes years, depending upon how damaged they were while living with their birth family or orphanage, before they can start to trust that their new parents aren't going to abandon them, abuse them, or take advantage of them sexually (and some of these children are never able to develop this level of trust).

You will make it far easier for these children to make such adjustments if you don't expect them to learn your family's lifestyle too quickly, and if you don't try to compensate for the bad things that happened to them when they were younger. Instead, you need to simply face the fact that there is no way for anyone to make it up to these children for the challenges of their early lives. What these children need to do instead is to be able to put their early childhood experiences behind them as best they can (usually with the help of a therapist), and start to look at the world around them with new eyes that aren't ruled by what these children believe about the world around them and the people in it based upon what happened to them during their early lives. You also need to keep in mind a very important old adage: “It's a question of mind over matter; if you don't mind, it won't matter,” which means that the better that you get at avoiding getting upset about what foster/adoptive children do (especially in the first 3-6 months that they live with you), the things that they do to try to upset you just won't matter to you all that much. If you find that the things that your foster/adoptive children do seem to be things that matter to you a lot, then you need to get some help from a therapist who can help you to learn how to “let go of the outcome” with your children, so that what they do doesn't matter to you anymore. And so, it's important that you allow them to keep their old, ratty clothing for a while. You can also give them some new clothing as well, if you want, but don't be surprised if that clothing ends up torn and destroyed before too much time goes by, as many of these children are convinced that they don't deserve nice things. But don't insist that they get rid off all of their old possessions, no matter how disgusted you may be by the condition of those possessions (remember the scene in “Martian Child” in which the foster dad suggests that the child throw away all of his old clothes, and pay attention to the distress on the face of the child at this suggestion). If you allow children to keep their old, dirty, often smelly and disgusting old clothes for a few months, they'll eventually be able to give them up, and move on to nicer things. You may need to explain the reason for this to the school, as they may wonder why you're letting your children come to school in old and filthy clothing.

2) Understanding Attachment, Attachment Disorders, and Building Healthy Attachment, Can Really Help Foster/Adoptive Parents

In order to have any hope of success when parenting severely traumatized children, it's vitally important that all foster and adoptive parents have some understanding about what attachment is, what creates attachment problems of varying degrees of severity, and what things foster/adoptive parents can do with these children to help them to build a healthier attachment style. First of all, healthy attachment starts to develop during pregnancy, as the mother forms a loving bond with her fetus, interacts with it (as the father usually does as well), talks to it, plays with it, etc. In addition, the sounds that fetuses hear through the uterine wall play a huge role in the stimulation of brain development for the fetus, as fetuses hear through their skin because their ear canals are blocked with a mucus-like substance. Because of these factors, an infant's ability to form a secure sense of attachment can already be impaired prior to birth, if the birth mother fails to bond with her fetus, and if the infant hears lots of screaming and yelling, threats of physical violence, and/or actually experiences physical violence to the mother while still in utero. Loud music and tv can also interfere with normal brain development for a fetus, which can make an infant predisposed to having difficulties with forming a healthy sense of attachment.

Simply put, attachment is the relationship that develops between and infant and the primary caregiver (usually the mother, and so that term will be used here for simplicity's sake, with the complete understanding that some children have two fathers or two mothers, and no insult is intended to these parents) as a result of the entire sequence of interactions between the infant and the mother throughout the first year of life. What this means is that a single instance, or a few instances of poor caregiving during the first year of life will usually not have much of an impact on the sense of attachment to others that the infant develops. When the infant mostly receives average to better than average care, gets his/her needs met the majority of the time, has his/her needs responded to in a timely fashion that mostly matches the timing of the infant, and when love, support, and nurturance are provided on a regular basis, a secure sense of attachment develops throughout the first year of life, and becomes solidified at about age one year, when the infant begins to walk upright on a regular basis. When the infant receives highly inconsistent care, or (even worse) is consistently neglected (as happens when infants are born to drug abusing mothers, live in orphanages, live with mothers who have serious psychiatric disorders, live with multiple primary caregivers throughout the first year of life, and/or experience prolonged separations from the mother during the first year of life), an insecure sense of attachment can develop, at best, and what more commonly develops is a disorganized sense of attachment.

By the time that infants start walking regularly, whatever sense of attachment that developed during their first year of life becomes fixed, which means that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to modify this attachment style later on in life, despite even quite desperate measures that a great many people have tried over the years to change children's attachment styles. If a healthy, secure attachment style has developed, seven healthy attachment behaviors should be consistently seen in children. These are called the “universal attachment behaviors” (because they are seen consistently in children all over the world), and they are:

1) the child follows the mother around, and stays close to her when in public

2) the child makes long-lasting and deep eye contact with the mother for long periods of time

3) the child protests, usually quite loudly, when separated from the mother

4) the child engages in reciprocal interactions with the mother, including smiling at each other, vocalizing to the mother in response to the mother's vocalizations, and playing interactive games with the mother

5) the child gently touches and interacts with the mother (parents usually need to work with their infants to be gentle when touching, but healthy infants respond to this pretty well, and will lessen the intensity of their touch with time)

6) refusing to be comforted by anyone other than the mother, especially when hurt, sick, or upset (usually by 4-6 months of age, infants will also allow comfort from the father, from other frequently seen adults, and/or from day care providers)

7) the child does what the mother asks him/her to do, especially when this isn't what the infant wants to do

When infants show six or seven of these behaviors 90% of the time or more often, they are said to have a secure sense of attachment, and are highly unlikely to have serious behavior or psychological problems as children. When infants show fewer than six or seven of the universal attachment behaviors most of the time, they are said to have an insecure sense of attachment, and are likely to have mild to moderate attachment problems. When infants show one or none of the universal attachment behaviors, they are said to have a disorganized sense of attachment, and are highly likely to have profound attachment problems, as well as the severe behavior problems that accompany a severely disorganized sense of attachment. Regardless of how loving, supportive, giving, and nurturing foster/adoptive are with children who have profound attachment problems, how much they provide these children with a belief in God (or whatever Higher Power they believe in), and how much they provide a highly structured and safe home life for these children, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that they can do to change the basic attachment style that these children have. This doesn't mean that these children are hopeless, or that foster/adoptive parents shouldn't bring children with severe attachment problems into their families. It simply means that foster/adoptive parents need to enter into the job of parenting these children with their eyes wide open as to the problems that some of these children will have, and that parents will have spent some time deeply thinking about (or praying about, if this is important to you) whether or not they have the ability to calmly and lovingly parent a child who may have absolutely no concept for how to have reciprocal interactions with others (and doesn't have any particular interest in learning how to do this), who will constantly go up to strangers and ask to go home with them, who doesn't stay with the family when the family is out in public, who seeks out comfort from any other adults than the parents, who invents false allegations of abuse and neglect by the foster/adoptive parents, and who never (or almost never) does one single thing that the foster/adoptive parents have asked or told him/her to do for many, many months on end. It takes special parents who can parent such a child without taking things personally, without getting invested in the outcome for this child, and who can have a sense of humor about the things that this child does.

Therefore, when you think about adopting or being a foster parent (or even if you already are foster/adoptive parents), you need to give some consideration to how frustrated you could become by a child who never does what you ask him/her to do, who behaves just fine at school (but never behaves at home), who likes to make you look bad in front of others, and/or who tells others that you don't feed him/her (or makes other false allegations of abuse by you). Now, I certainly don't want to scare people off from becoming foster/adoptive parents, as I have been a foster parent to two different children who had profound attachment and behavior problems, and I have never thought to myself, “I wish I had never taken this child into my home.” But I'm also a fairly easy-going person who doesn't become easily angered by the things that children do, and who likes to use surprising and fun consequences with children. Please be reassured by the fact that most foster/adoptive children (65% of them, according to research that's been done) don't have these profound attachment problems, and by the fact that about 10% of foster/adoptive children seem to have escaped their early childhoods without any significant problems at all. But I also want to warn parents, as many have the misconception that if you adopt children early enough in life, and/or if children lived in orphanages where a good quality of care is provided, that those children won't have serious to profound attachment problems. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. If children have birth mothers who have serious to profound attachment problems of their own, were teen-age mothers, and/or live in China, these mothers typically don't bond well with their infants in utero.

In fact, extensive research has shown that intelligence and personality style (also known as temperament) play a huge role in whether or not children will experience a highly disorganized attachment style as a result of severe early neglect and/or living in an orphanage (these are the two main causes, but not the only causes, of profound attachment problems). Interestingly, children with higher intelligence are far more likely to develop profound attachment problems than are children with average or low-average intelligence. In fact, the average IQ for children with profound attachment problems was 20 points higher than was the average IQ for children with mild to moderate attachment problems. In addition, 2/3 of children with mild to moderate attachment problems had IQ's in the average to low-average range, while 2/3 of the children with profound attachment problems had above-average to superior intelligence. I have hypothesized that this is because more intelligent children pay more attention to what is going on around them, and can thus be more easily damaged by their early life experiences. In addition, the research has clearly shown that children who have the combination of shy, aggressive, and sensitive personality traits are far more likely to develop profound attachment problems than are children who lack this combination of personality traits. In fact, none of the children in the research who were shy and sensitive, were aggressive and sensitive, or were shy and aggressive had profound attachment problems. It was ONLY when they had the combination of all three personality styles that they developed profound attachment problems.

This is why it's so important for you as a person, and the two of you as a couple, to deeply examine your desire to adopt or to become foster parents, and decide whether or not you could handle being the parents of a child with profound attachment problems. If you decide that you can, then it won't matter all that much to you which children become members of your family. However, if you honestly realize that you couldn't handle children with profound attachment problems, then both your family and any potential children who might join your family will all be far better served by your being very selective about which children you bring into your family. You aren't bad people if you realize that you have too much of a need for your life to be structured and to go the way that you plan it to, and that it would be very difficult for you to parent children who never do what they're told to do, who ruin every family vacation (or other times when the family is having fun), and/or who seem to be doing their best to make your lives miserable. You're actually being courageous enough to be able to stand up and say, “We're just not going to be the best parents for a child with profound attachment problems.” Making this decision will best serve both your family, and also any children with profound attachment problems who you choose not to bring into your family. All too many families have been destroyed over the years because foster/adoptive parents weren't provided with information about the problems of children with profound attachment problems, and so weren't allowed to make an informed decision before they brought these children into their families. Please be assured that I have absolutely no interest in dissuading people from adopting, or from becoming foster parents. Nothing could be further from my intentions. I simply believe that parents need to know what they could be getting themselves into when they become foster/adoptive parents, and so can go into this endeavor with their eyes open.

With all of this in mind, what can you, as parents, do to make a better informed choice about bringing children into your family? First of all, be very cautious about any children in an orphanage (this applies to children living in foster homes too, especially those who have been in muitple foster homes) who run up to you and ask if they can go home with you, or who start calling you “mommy” and “daddy” within a few minutes of meeting you. Children are normally cautious about meeting new people, and children under age one year should even fuss about being with you, and will try to get away from you to hide behind the orphanage workers. This is especially true when children are nine months old (referred to as stranger anxiety) and eighteen months old (called separation anxiety). It is preferable to avoid adopting children at these two ages, as significant attachment problems can be created in children adopted from orphanages at these ages when those children would otherwise not have developed attachment problems if adopted at an earlier or later age. You'd also like to get a sense of how securely attached any children you might wish to adopt are by checking out to see if they make good and prolonged eye contact with the adults who care for them. Do they follow those adults around, and engage in reciprocal behaviors with those adults? When asked to be more gentle in interactions with you, do they become more gentle, or do they become more aggressive and hit you harder? Do they do what adults ask them to do, even if they don't want to stop doing what they're doing? Are they overly shy, or overly aggressive? Do they become extremely upset when things don't go the way that they want them to, and are they very difficult to calm down once they've become upset (these are the overly sensitive children)? Do they appear to be quite intelligent, or does their level of intelligence seem to be more in the normal range? You want to look at a combination of all of these factors when deciding upon bringing children into your family, unless you've decided that you're a laid-back enough couple that you can have a sense of humor about children who urinate on your floor, and who flick their boogers onto your carpet on a regular basis.

Of course, in a situation in which you are foster parents, you may not have much choice about which children become members of your family. In this situation, or with children adopted from orphanages, and even with children adopted from the U.S., there are some things that foster/adoptive parents can do to make the transition into their family easier for the children who are joining you. First of all, you want to make every effort you can to make the transition to your family easier for your children. This means that you want to feed them familiar foods, provide them with a routine that's similar to the routine where they were living before (the exception to this is when children come directly from an incredibly abusive and neglectful birth home to your home for foster care), and provide them with familiar sounds, sights, and smells as best you can. If you're going to an orphanage to pick up a child, or taking a child from a foster home to your home so that you can adopt that child, make sure that you have made some sort of arrangements with the child's current primary caregiver that he/she will give you a piece of clothing (shirts and blouses seem to work the best for this) and/or the child's pillowcase or favorite blanket to take home with you. We refer to this as a “mommy shirt”, as it's something that smells familiar to the child, and so can be very soothing for the child to sleep with, and even to carry around for a few days or weeks after coming to live with your family (make sure that this shirt hasn't been laundered before the child takes it home). It often helps for you to bring two to three new tops or blouses with you to give to the child's primary caregiver so that she'll give you one she wears when caring for your new child (or you can bring a new set of sheets, a new blanket, or a new pillow, if you want to exchange a new pillow case, blanket, or pillow for one the child has been sleeping with). Also, if you're bringing home a child who doesn't speak your language, do what to can to find someone who does speak the child's native language, and who can record a tape or CD with nursery rhymes and children's stories in the child's native language that can be played during the day, especially at times when the child is upset, and at nap and bedtime. These tactics can also be used when taking any child to day care, as they help the child to feel familiar at nap time.

Doing trust exercises with children is a good way to help them to develop a greater sense of trust in you, and it's important to remember that most of these children have never had the experience of being able to trust adults. As a result, it's important that parents don't expect that their foster/adoptive children will be able to learn how to trust easily. Trusting adults is something that children should learn during the first year of life (in child development, the first year of life is sometimes referred to as the “trust versus mistrust” stage of development), and when the adults with whom children lived weren't trustworthy, then learning how to trust adults can take years, as the beliefs that children hold once they start to walk are extremely difficult to change later on in life, regardless of how much love, comfort, and support children receive from their foster or adoptive parents. The easiest trust exercise is to ask the child to stand in front of one of the parents, facing away from the parent, and about a foot away from the parent. Ask the child to close his/her eyes, and to allow him/herself to falls backwards into the arms of the parent. It's very important that the parent catch the child within a few inches of the start of the child's fall. The parent can then gently push the child back to his/her feet, and have the child fall again. This can be repeated 5-10 times. As time goes by, the parent can allow the child to fall slightly farther before catching the child, as this is what helps to build trust for the child. This exercise works best if parents can avoid asking the child if he/she now trusts them more, or even discussing the issue of trust at all. The child will develop trust better if he/she isn't asked about it. With time, the child can be allowed to fall farther and farther before the parent catches the child, and the trick is for the child to be able to fall without opening his/her eyes, or buckling his/her knees. Eventually the child will fall a foot or so before being caught, and without opening his/her eyes, or buckling his/her knees.

Another useful trust exercise is called a “trust walk”. The child needs to wear a blindfold, and allow one of the parents to lead him/her around. At first, it's important for the parents to give the child permission to peek from under the blindfold every few feet (the child will do this anyway, so you may as well make it okay for him/her to do this, rather than getting angry when he/she peeks). Remember that developing trust usually takes the entire first year of life, and when it isn't developed during that time, it can take many months or years for it to be developed, if it ever can. So, cut your child some slack on this issue, and make the trust exercises as easy for the child as you can. Needless to say, it's vitally important that the parent avoid doing anything to tease the child or fool the child when walking the child around with the blindfold on. Trust can only be built when parents behave in a trustworthy manner. At first, the trust walks should be no more than a minute or two, but eventually they can last for 10 to 15 minutes. And, after that, the parents need to be blindfolded themselves, and allow the child to lead them around. If the child has serious to profound attachment problems, he/she may be tempted to lead the parents into things. When this happens, it's important that parents don't become angry, but instead talk with the child about how difficult it can be to behave in a trustworthy manner when the child's birth parents weren't trustworthy people. In fact, many of the adults (if not all of them) who were friends of the birth parents probably weren't very trustworthy either. Thus, even a child didn't develop a secure sense of attachment or of trust in his/her birth parents, there are a number of things that foster/adoptive parents can do to help to build a healthier sense of attachment for a child, as well to help that child to trust them somewhat more.

Another useful trust exercise is one that can be fun for the whole family, and this is one that is done during a family dinner (at the dinner table with everyone together, with the tv, video games, computers, and music turned off). During this dinner no one is allowed to ask for anything for themselves. They can only offer food, salt, pepper, catsup, or whatever to other members of the family. This technique requires all family members to trust that the others will take care of them, and will provide them with as much food as they need. In this way, the only conversation at the table during this dinner will cover any topics that have nothing to do with asking for food, or talking about food (although, after the dinner is over, the person/people who cooked dinner can be thanked by other family members). Most families have a great deal of fun with this activity.

3) Love Doesn't Solve Everything

Probably one of the biggest mistakes that foster/adoptive parents can make is to assume that by providing their new child with lots of love, nurturance, and comfort that this will help that child to be able to attach to them, and to get over all of his/her early life experiences. As Nancy Thomas, an excellent and highly experienced therapeutic parent puts it in one of her books, “Love Is Never Enough”: When a child is severely neglected and/or abused, this creates severe traumatization and a significant attachment disruption that isn't easily healed. Remember that the beliefs about one's loveableness, the trustworthiness of adults, and whether or not adults will take good care of you and your needs become fixed for the child as soon as he/she walks regularly, and can be almost impossible to change later on in life, regardless of how much love and comfort a child is given. This is a very important issue for foster/adoptive parents to understand, as many parents become extremely frustrated when the child doesn't reciprocate their love, and instead rejects that love. Vital to understanding this concept is for parents to realize and internalize a basic principle of life on earth -- and that is that whenever you love someone more than they love themselves, you make them wrong, and they will nearly always attack you for it. Since many severely traumatized children believe that they are unlovable (what else are you going to believe when your own birth mother doesn't even love you?), and many of them are convinced of this fact to the very depths of their souls, every time you love them or do something nice for them, they will have great difficulty taking in your love. Those who have more serious behavior problems will usually do something nasty to their parents to retaliate for being loved. You need to remember that severely traumatized children believe that they're only being loved when they aren't wrong (which is why they lie about what they do, and argue endlessly to prove that they aren't wrong), as being wrong means that they aren't loved, and will never be loved.

So, when you take on the task of becoming a foster and/or adoptive parent, it's very important that you allow yourself to love children who may become very upset when you do, and who will probably have greater to lesser degrees of difficulty with accepting and reciprocating that love. It may take children many, many years before they are able to perceive themselves as being lovable, if they are ever able to pull this off. Many severely traumatized children never seem to be able to believe that they are lovable, and so, when they start dating in high school, they often choose partners who are quite similar to their birth parents, regardless of how much love you have given to them over the years that they have lived with you. Sadly, the wound of not being loved by your own birth mother seems to be one that is extremely difficult for children to heal, and often continues to affect them for the remainder of their lives. As a result, please don't expect that your children will be able to shift this easily. Thank whatever God or Higher Power that you believe in if your children are able to pull this off, and can actually reciprocate your love in a healthy way.

4) God (or whatever Higher Power you believe in) Doesn't Solve Everything Either

One of the most difficult things for me to acknowledge when I was treating severely traumatized children (because I am a Christian minister) is that a strong belief in God (I'll use this term for the sake of brevity here, but understand that readers may believe in Allah, or some other Higher Power, or may be agnostics or atheists) very often doesn't help children to be able to heal from early traumatization any more than the love of the foster/adoptive parents does. This is often difficult for many foster and adoptive parents to understand as well, as many of the people who become foster or adoptive parents are strongly religious or spiritual people who have a very strong belief in God, and who have found their personal relationship with God to help them in many areas of their lives, especially during the hard times that life often presents us with. As a result of their own beliefs, many foster/adoptive parents are eager to share these beliefs with their children, and expect that their children will adopt similar beliefs to their own, and will be comforted and helped by their personal relationship with God. However, many severely traumatized children feel abandoned by God, believe that there must be something wrong with them because God allowed such often quite horrible things to happen to them (they often believe that while all other children are okay because God doesn't make junk, they must have somehow slipped past God's quality control system when God wasn't paying attention, and that they are basically defective), and/or simply don't believe in God at all. Many children will speak as if they have adopted the religious/spiritual beliefs of their foster or adoptive parents, and many often put on a show as if they believe what their foster/adoptive parents believe, but, when push comes to shove, they are often actually atheists, or at best agnostics, deep inside. As a child, how do you make sense out of the terrible things that happened to you while living with your birth parents without blaming God in some way? From an adult perspective, this belief makes very little sense, as we all know that God doesn't make bad things happen to some people (especially to bad people). People make bad things happen to people, including to innocent children who didn't deserve any of the horrible things that happened to them. However, convincing children that there isn't anything wrong with them, that they aren't inherently bad, and that God loves them just as much as He loves all people can be a very challenging task.

I often suggest that the foster/adoptive parents take the child down to a local newborn nursery to look at all of the babies through the window. Then I ask them to ask the child to help them to pick out which babies are bad, which babies deserve to be abused and neglected, and which babies deserve to be abandoned by God. Of course, there are no babies who are bad, or who deserve to be mistreated by their birth parents, or abandoned and punished by God. It's just that Earth is a tough planet, and sometimes really, really bad things happen to people here, and it really isn't anybody's fault most of the time when bad things happen. God doesn't plan for those bad things to happen. They just happen. And one of the easiest ways to come to terms with the bad things that have happened to you is to develop a personal relationship with God, to feel God's love for you, to allow that love into your heart, and to consider the possibility that there never was anything wrong with you. You didn't deserve to be neglected and abused, or maybe just abandoned in an orphanage where you received less than adequate care.

Another thing that parents can do to help a child with these issues is to find the earliest photo that is available for this child (for a child in an orphanage, this may not be until the child comes to live with you, although many orphanages do take pictures of children as soon as those children come to live in the orphanage; by the same token, many severely neglected children have no baby pictures except the ones taken by social services as part of an abuse investigation). The parents then want to ask the child, “What's wrong with this child?” The child will often say, “She got abused.” The parent can then say, “That's what happened to her. That's not who she is. What's wrong with her?” This conversation may go on for quite a while with a number of different variations before the child eventually realizes (or the parent tells the child, as it's become evident to the parent that the child is never going to figure this out on her own) that there never was anything wrong with her. She's just as lovable as any other child, and God wasn't punishing her by making bad things happen to her. The parent can ask what the child would need to do in order to believe that the child in that picture is wonderful, and didn't deserve to have bad things happen to her. This can often help the child to make small shifts in his/her low self-esteem, and to start to move forward with healthier beliefs about him/herself.

However, parents also need to understand that these tactics may never help foster or adoptive children to be able to develop a true connection with God, or even to develop an actual belief in God, despite the fact that these children may mouth such words to their parents because they know that this is what their parents want them to do, and they don't want to make their parents angry with them. This may be a sad state of affairs for these children (I know that it always makes me sad when I realize that a given child doesn't really believe in God, or in the power of prayer to help things to heal), but it's very important that parents keep in mind that this is the child's problem, not the problem of the parents. Regardless of how strongly religious or spiritual parents may be, it's vitally important that they allow their foster/adoptive children to have their own beliefs. If parents are unable to do this, then they are making their foster/adoptive children wrong, and we already know that many of these children are simply unable to tolerate being wrong, as this means to them that they aren't loved. This can be an extremely difficult thing for parents to do, but you need to think of it as a gift that you're giving to your foster/adoptive children. You're not going to judge them, or make them wrong, for how they perceive God. After all, it was Jesus who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” and He didn't require children to believe in Him or His Father before they could come unto him. The less that it matters to you as parents what your children believe, the GREATER the likelihood is that they will eventually develop their own relationships with God. The more that you care about what they believe, the less likely it is that they will ever develop a personal relationship with God. I know that this is counterintuitive, but I can attest to you, after many years of experiencing in working with these children, that it is true.

5) Children Can't Always be Taught to Learn From Their Mistakes, Even If Rules are Clearly Presented and are Consistently Enforced and If Punishments are Strict Enough

It's pretty much a basic belief of all parents that children can be taught to learn from their mistakes, learn best when rules are clearly and consistently presented, and when consequences are consistently and fairly provided for misbehavior, particularly when the punishments that are given are severe enough to truly impact upon the children. However, when children have experienced severe traumatization, and particularly when this traumatization includes severe neglect during the first six months of life, this may not necessarily be the case. The reason for this lies in how the brains of young children are stimulated to develop. First of all, brain development during fetal life is stimulated by the sounds that the fetus hears through the uterine wall, and through cells in its own skin (the fetus “hears” through its skin, rather than through its ears, which are plugged with the same substance that plugs the nostrils). Thus, if fetuses hear lots of screaming and yelling and other noxious noises during their later development, they will be born with a predisposition to having underdevelopment in areas of the brain stem and midbrain.

Next, the midbrain develops primarily during the first six months of life, and is stimulated to develop by all of the things that adults do to move babies (you pick the baby up, you rock the baby, you bounce the baby, you toss the baby gently into the air and catch it, etc). When babies aren't picked up and held, rocked, and bounced, the midbrain fails to develop adequately, which means that children will have problems paying attention, will be easily distracted, will have great difficulty managing and modulating their emotions, and will generally seem to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, most commonly called ADHD. However, when ADHD is caused by immaturity and impairment in the midbrain, rather than by a biochemical problem, children don't usually respond all that well to the medications that usually are quite effective in treating ADHD. Immaturity and impairment in the midbrain often lead to problems in later brain development, particularly with cause-and-effect thinking. This ability develops when babies learn how to roll from back to front while reaching for something over their heads that they're unable to reach in any other way. It's when babies can get what they want by some movement that they themselves can make that they connect the movement that they make (the cause) with getting what they want (the effect). Rolling from back to front while reaching overhead is what lays down the cellular pathways in the brain that allow for cause-and-effect thinking to develop.

When babies are severely neglected, and aren't picked up and moved much, their ability to learn how to roll over becomes delayed (often until they are eight to nine months old, when it should develop prior to five months of age), and so they don't develop a clear ability to have cause-and-effect thinking, and some of them don't develop this ability at all. As a result, they NEVER learn from their mistakes or misbehaviors, regardless of what consequences or punishments parents may assign for their misbehaviors. This is probably one of the most frustrating problems that foster/adoptive parents face with these children. These children will continue to engage in the same misbehaviors over and over and over, no matter how firmly and consistently they're punished for those misbehavior. And it seems as if one of the hardest parts about this for parents is that is simply isn't logical. The reason for this is that the parents have made the error of assuming that their children are reasonable and logical people, in the same way that healthy children are. However, it's ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL that foster/adoptive parents approach the task of parenting these children from the perspective that these children are unreasonable and illogical people, primarily because they lack the necessary connections in the brain that would allow them to rely upon cause-and-effect thinking, and so to be reasonable and logical.

Parents need to keep in mind that the average child knows what the rules of a family are within a few months of living with that family, and so doesn't need to be continuously reminded of what the family's rules and expectations are (most parents make the mistake of repeating these rules and expectations to the child each time the child fails to follow the rules, which only gives the child the hidden message that the parents believe that the child is too stupid to have grasped what the rules are). Instead, parents need to expect that their child does know what the rules and expectations are, but is choosing not to follow those rules and expectations. Parents will then say, okay, then how do we encourage the child to accept and follow our rules and expectations, and/or punish our child so that he/she chooses to follow our rules and expectations. The simple answer to this is, if you have a child who lacks cause-and-effect thinking, THERE IS SIMPLY NO WAY THAT YOU WILL EVER BE ABLE TO DO THIS because the child's brain lacks the necessary cellular connections to be able to learn from his/her mistakes and misbehaviors. Parents need to be able to come to terms with the fact that the child has a short-circuit in his/her brain that is essentially related to brain damage, and that there is nothing that you can do to fix this. Now, there are some approaches to stimulating brain development in areas where its underdeveloped or damaged, including visual, sound, movement, and EEG neurofeedback treatments. Personally, I have found that movement therapies such as Feldenkrais (go to the Feldenkrais Guild website to find a practitioner near you) to work the best for most children, but other parents have found sound therapies such as Samonas or Tomatis, or EEG neurofeedback to be useful.

What the implications are for parents is that you need to make a complete mind-set shift to one in which you no longer expect that your child will change his/her poor choices and misbehaviors as a result of the consequences and punishments that you give, nor will talking with or lecturing your child have any impact on his/her behaviors and misbehaviors whatsoever. In addition, using reasonable and logical consequences, providing immediate consequences, and having the punishment “fit the crime” aren't necessary, as they aren't going to change the child's behavior either. Further, taking away the child's favorite activity or toy is also useless, and puts you at-risk for becoming abusive as parents because you are using this consequence with the deliberate intention of doing something that will hurt your child the most. Whenever you have this intention, you're in danger of being turned into the abusive birth parents, and you must avoid this at all costs. So, it's very important that you simply accept the fact that consequences and punishments aren't going to change your child's behavior until he/she can learn cause-and-effect thinking, and that learning cause-and-effect thinking past the age of eight months of age is very difficult for the child to do. This is one of the things that makes foster and adoptive parenting more difficult than parenting birth children.

6) Learning How to Become a Member of a Family Isn't an Easy Thing to Do

Most of us tend to think that with a lot of love, a stable home environment, and consistent and predictable schedules and rules, most children should be able to adjust to becoming a member of a foster or adoptive family within a few months, and, fortunately, probably close to half of these children do. However, for the other half of these children there may be many challenges that they face as they approach becoming a member of your family, and for about a fourth of them this is something that may never happen. Some of these children come from extremely dysfunctional birth families, and they fully expect that it's only a matter of time (and will probably happen when they least expect it and aren't paying close enough attention, which is why they're often quite hypervigilant) before your family suddenly becomes exactly like their birth family. Some of these children have major problems with trust, and they also have absolutely no idea that interactions between people can be reciprocal and loving. It may take them many years to be able to learn how to be a reciprocal, loving, and contributing member of a family. At first, they are more likely to seem to be doing whatever they can to make your family life miserable. This is also related to a failure in brain development. The brain is supposed to lay down pathways that take emotions from a part of the brain called the amygdala to the frontal lobes so that feelings can be processed by the frontal lobes. This develops throughout the first year of life as babies are picked up and moved by adults, and eventually as they begin to move themselves around. Once this brain pathway develops, a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus (which connects the amygdala to the frontal lobes) can be used to send pleasurable sensations to the frontal lobes to be processed. For severely neglected children, the alternate brain pathway from the amygdala to the frontal lobes fails to develop, and so children basically “hijack” the caudates (you have two of them, as you have two amygdali) to send all of their emotions to the frontal lobes. One result of this is that they then have great difficulties experiencing joy, pleasure, or other positive emotions, leaving them feeling miserable most of the time.

As we all know, misery loves company, and so children don't want to be left feeling miserable by themselves. As a result, they tend to spread misery around them, and the truly sad part is that there isn't really much that they can do about this. Many of them have absolutely no sense of humor, don't get jokes (or laugh at jokes when they do get the jokes), hardly ever smile or seem to be able to have fun (except when they're making others miserable, or when they laugh at the misfortunes of others), and have great difficulty with having fun during family activities. They don't enjoy Disneyland or similar places, and often ruin family vacations for everyone to such a point that foster and adoptive parents are often tempted to leave them with friends or relatives during family vacations so that the rest of the family can have a good time. The reason for this is often because foster/adoptive parents don't understand that these children really have no control over this problem, and aren't doing it deliberately, even though it may appear to the parents that it is deliberate. What foster/adoptive parents need to do if they have children who have this problem is to have compassion for how difficult life is for these children. Try to imagine what your life would be like if you were NEVER able to have fun, to experience pleasure or joy, or to laugh and have a good time doing things with the people you love. It would really suck!!! So imagine how it must feel to these children, who are feeling left out of the fun that everyone else is having, are totally frustrated by their lack of ability to experience the fun that everyone else is having, become angry about this, and then act-out in response to their anger and frustration. Instead of becoming angry back at these children, you need to be able to say something empathic, such as, “Honey, I know this is hard for you. We don't expect that you'll be able to have a good time, or to allow the rest of us to have a good time. How sad for you. We love you anyway.” This won't change children's behavior, or make it any easier for them, but it does help parents to avoid becoming so angry and frustrated with their foster/adoptive children.

Fortunately, there are some things that parents can do to help foster/adoptive children learn how to become healthier family members. Basic reciprocity can be learned, often most easily through the use of games such as “Simon Says,”“Mother May I," and “Red Light, Green Light.” I particularly like “Simon Says” because children have to listen carefully to what their parents say, which is something that many traumatized children don't do particularly well. “Mother May I” is a highly reciprocal game. If you don't know how it is played, the Mother tells one of the players (usually the children) to take some sort of step or steps toward her (baby steps, giant steps, umbrella steps, etc.), or even sideways or backwards. The player must then say, “Mother May I,” and wait for the Mother to say, “Yes you may” before actually doing what the Mother told that player to do. The first player to cross a previously designated finish line becomes the next Mother. The Mother takes turns between the various players, and children need to wait their turn before they move. I also like this game because the players are allowed to sneak, as long as they don't get caught by the Mother (if they get caught, they have to go back to the starting line). Since many traumatized children like to be sneaky, and will cheat to win at games, this becomes a way of having sneakiness be okay. Children are also allowed to sneak in “Red Light, Green Light,” and are also sent back to the starting line if they get caught by whoever is It. In case you don't know this game either, the person who is It stands at the finish line, and then calls out “Green Light” as he/she turns his/her back to the players. The players then run as fast as they can toward the finish line. The person who is It then calls out “Red Light” as he/she turns back around, and players must freeze immediately. Anyone who is seen by the person who is It to be still moving when the It person turns back around must go back to the starting line. Whoever reaches the finish line first becomes the next It.

I also really like the board game called “Life." My favorite rule in this game is that if you have more children than will fit in your car, you just cram them in wherever you can, just like you do in real life. This is an interesting game because each player gets to choose whether to go to college (you make a lot more money if you do), to buy car and fire and life insurance (you have to pay big penalties at certain points in the game if you don't have these, and you get a big payout for your life insurance at the end of the game). Also, you get money for each of your children at the end of the game, which totally cracks me up, since in real life children are basically consumers of money. Anyway, I love this game because it is totally about the choices that people can make in life, and I highly recommend that families play it frequently. It probably won't surprise any of my readers that I am a strong supporter of having a “family game night” one evening a week during which all family members must be present. Some families like to include Bible study with this, but I usually recommend separating a Bible study family evening from a playful family evening. The playful family evenings have the sole purpose of the family members playing something together, or even several different games. This can be a good time for “Simon Says,” or “Twister,” or other games and activities that all family members can engage in together. Of course, some foster/adoptive children may do their best to ruin this evening for the family, and parents can commiserate with them about this. They will probably also cheat, argue a lot about the rules and whether or not they're cheating, and similar things. One way of dealing with this is to play all games TEGWAR style. TEGWAR stands for “The Exciting Game Without Any Rules” and is played exactly how it sounds. Whoever's turn it is gets to make the rules during his/her turn, and then the next player gets to do the same thing, and so on. This can be done with card games and board games, or even with “Mother May I” and similar games. There is no way that anyone can win or lose when games are played TEGWAR style because each player wins when it is his/her turn.

Other activities that can help to teach children how to be a participating member of a family can include doing chores to help out the family, and to build a better family. Doing extra chores can also be used as a consequence for misbehavior. I like the game “Wheel of Fortune,” because its wheel can be used for many things (consequences can be put on the wheel, and then the wheel is spun to decide what the consequence for a child's misbehavior is), including a means of selecting extra chores that children can do to demonstrate how much they want to be a useful member of the family. I actually like it when parents select chores for children this way in general, as it provides far more excitement and luck for children, rather than having chores be assigned. Of course, for children younger than six years, chores usually need to be assigned because there are things that they aren't capable of doing yet, and by the way, all children should start doing chores as soon as they can walk and carry things, even if it's just clearing off your dishes and flatware after a meal and taking them to the sink to be washed. Young children love to do chores, and so the earlier you start them at this, the less resistance to doing chores you will experience with your children. Of course some traumatized children will never do their chores correctly, and usually need somewhere between five and ten tries to get them done correctly. I usually suggest that the parents bet with each other how many times it will take these children to get their chores done correctly, and that the parents take turns being the one who bets that it will only take children four or five tries, and the one who bets that it will probably take at least ten tries. Also, when children have great difficulty completing chores correctly, they aren't allowed to tell their parents, “I'm done” when they think they're done with a chore because they obviously have no clue as to when a chore has been completed correctly. What they need to say instead is “I'm ready for inspection.” When parents go to inspect the chore, it's important that they find the part of the chore that was done correctly (sometimes this can be VERY difficult to find, but parents need to work hard to find something, even if it's only, “I can tell that you thought hard about your chore”), and to praise the child for the part that is done correctly. They then ask the child something like, “Do you think this is done the way I want it”? The child will probably want to argue, at which point the parent can pat the child on the head, and say, “Nice try. Let me know when you're ready for inspection again.” And, if the child is getting closer to the number of tries that that parent bet it would take to get the chore done that night, the parent can also encourage the child to let him/her (that parent) win the bet.

7) Having Fun is Crucial to Surviving Life as Foster/Adoptive Parents

Because of the difficulties that many severely traumatized children have with having fun, with telling and getting jokes, and with playing practical jokes in a healthy way (the reasons for this were discussed above in terms of neurological limitations), it's very important that foster and adoptive parents find ways to build ways of having fun into their lives. When children are into creating lose-lose situations (which some severely traumatized children are), parents need to find ways to create win-win situations. In most of these situations, the parents get to win, but the children very seldom, if ever, choose to allow themselves to win as well. This provides parents with the opportunity to commiserate with their children about how difficult it is for those children to allow themselves to win, and to wish them better luck with this next time. One of the most important ways that parents of severely traumatized children can have more fun in their lives is to let go of the outcome for their foster/adoptive children. This can be a challenging thing for parents to do, as basically all of us as parents want our children to turn out well, and to be able to live successful adult lives. However, with severely traumatized children, you need to be able to set much lower expectations for what constitutes success, primarily because these children have been so seriously affected in so many areas of life functioning that the likelihood that they will be able to recover fully from all of those imitations isn't very good. This doesn't mean that you can't still desire that your children live up to their fullest potential. It's simply that what constitutes their fullest potential may be far lower now than it was at the time that they were born.

For example, my foster son (who will be 33 in December, which just seems impossible), who experienced profound neglect and extreme physical and sexual abuse at the hands of both of his birth parents, who were serious drug abusers, was an extremely intelligent young man. However, his problems were so severe that I was about his 37th placement from the time that he came into foster care at age 6 years until he was placed with me at age 14 years. He was extremely oppositional, and so would never do school work or homework. Since I knew that this was a battle that I could never win with him, I decided to let it go, and to set goals that success for him would be that he reached age 18 years without anyone being dead, or anyone being pregnant. Whether or not he ever graduated from high school or went to college didn't matter to me a bit. It made me sad to see him waste such potential, but my life was going to be so much happier if I simply avoided battles with him over school-related issues. Much to my eternal surprise, he did eventually graduate from high school, and even did attend college off-and-on, although he never completed any courses. While he certainly had the intelligence to be a doctor or a lawyer, or anything else that he wanted to be, he was never able to allow himself to succeed at anything, and would sabotage himself at every job he had. Every time he was promoted at work, he would stop going to work, and so would lose his job. This was very sad for him, but it is his life, and he gets to choose what he does with it, just like all of the rest of us do.

And so, an important parenting principle with severely traumatized children is that school is between your child and the school. Or, as I put it when my son's teacher insisted that I HAD to make him do his school work and home work, I asked her to please explain to me how someone could MAKE a 14 year-old do something that he doesn't want to do, as I could use all of the help with this that I could get. When she persisted, I told her that I would make her a deal. If she would come to my house and get my son to make his bed and clean up his room, I would be happy to take over responsibility for his school work and home work. She never bothered me about this issue again. So, it's really a matter of understanding your child's limitations and challenges. Of course you can push them some, but many of them simply don't have the neurological or psychological resources to be doing anything better than what they are doing at the moment. It can help you as parents to think about all of the things that happened to your child before he/she became your child, and what problems those things created for your child. You then want to ask yourself if you would be functioning any better than your child is. This often helps you to be able to set more realistic goals for your child.

Another example would be my foster daughter, who is now almost 20, and who came to live with me just after her 16th birthday. She had been severely drug exposed prior to her birth, and was born dead because of drugs that her birth mother took while in labor with her. In fact, she was about 10 minutes old before she had a heartbeat. Then she was shot up with drugs by her birth parents on several occasions during her early life when the parents wanted to keep her quiet while they were having drug parties with their friends. She had prolonged periods of low oxygen levels at these times. As a result, she has significant brain damage, many learning disabilities, very poor social judgement, and very limited academic abilities. At the same time, she is quite intelligent in the areas of her brain that aren't damaged, and writes and spells quite well. She also reads relatively well, and has an excellent sense of direction. She had been in home school with her adoptive parents since 4th grade because she would just be allowed to space out at school in her special education classes, and so was still functioning at a first grade level academically. At age 16 her reading, writing, and spelling were at a 6th grade level, but her math skills were at a first grade level. She can add and subtract when not under pressure, but has absolutely no ability to do multiplication or division. When she came to live with me she was attending 9th grade, but asked not to be sent to public school because she didn't want to be back in special education classes, and to be teased by her peers for this. Given the number of limitations that she had in so many areas of her life, I chose to focus her education on the life survival skills that she would need as an adult, in getting her a job, teaching her how to maintain a bank account, and similar activities (where I live children can legally drop out of school at age 16). It could be argued that I should have forced her to go to school, but this would have involved constant fights with her to get her up and off to school every morning, and this would have been quite detrimental to our relationship. As a result, I decided that we would both be far happier if we took advantage of her strengths, helped her to get her a job that would teach her how to make change accurately, even when under stress, and teach her something that she was very interested in, which was in learning how to cook and how to be a chef.

Other aspects of having more fun with foster/adoptive children have to do with teaching them how to enjoy jokes, how to play safe and appropriate practical jokes on others, and how to be more playful in their daily lives. I encourage one parent to help children plan a practical joke to play on the other parent, and that each parent do this with children at different points in time. Most of these children have absolutely no idea how to plan and play out a safe an appropriate practical joke, and so they'll need help with this. You can also help your other children to play practical jokes on your other children, taking care that things don't get out of control. Wrestling with children and tickling them gently can also be ways of having fun with them, but you may want to make certain that both parents are present (and other children as well, and/or have the video camera running to avoid false allegations of abuse) so that foster/adoptive children who were sexually abused in previous living situations don't inadvertently feel that they're being sexually abused. Be prepared that such activities might trigger symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for some children, and for stopping the activity if this happens. Many people will say that this is bad advice, and that you shouldn't touch children who have been sexually abused. However, what these people are forgetting is that, when you don't touch children who've been sexually abused, you're give them the hidden message that they're untouchable, and they will draw the conclusion that they're untouchable because there is something wrong with them as a result of being sexually abused. It's also important to stress to children that most adults don't touch children inappropriately or sexually abuse them, and that these children need to learn how to be able to tell which adults are safe, and which ones aren't.

Finally, having more fun when consequencing your children can also be a way of bringing more enjoyment into your lives as parents. One of the nicest things about having unreasonable and illogical children is that parents don't have to worry about coming up with reasonable and logical consequences. Instead, they can have a lot of fun coming up with unusual, fun, and illogical consequences (like putting the consequences on a “Wheel of Fortune” wheel and spinning it to see what consequence or punishment children get). When parents bet with each other about how children will behave this can also be a source of a great deal of fun. Parents can also play practical jokes on each other, and on various family members as a way of having fun. In general, just think of being playful with all family members in every way that you can, take pleasure from your interactions with each other, watch funny movies and tv shows, and just have fun in whatever ways you can. Without this, parenting severely traumatized children can simply become such a grim task that you'll find yourselves wondering why you ever undertook it in the first place.

8) How Your Child Turns Out Is NOT a Reflection of Your Parenting Abilities

Unfortunately, many parents get caught up in the belief that how their children turn out is a reflection of their skills as parents, but nothing could be further from the truth. There are many quite good parents whose children make poor choices for themselves, who may end up on drugs, or abusing alcohol, or who may even end up spending some time in jail or prison. And there are some really poor parents whose children may turn out just fine. You need to keep in mind that this is Earth, and that the physicist Heisenberg rules here. One of his basic principles is called the “Uncertainty Principle” and this principle states that no one can ever predict the outcome of anything, since simply observing something changes how it will appear to the observer. While this may seem to make little to no sense (like many principles of quantum physics, which are nearly completely the opposite of each other for large particles as they are for small particles, which in itself is almost unbelievable), it actually turns out to be true. As a result, it's very important for all parents, but especially for foster and adoptive parents, to keep in mind that how your children turn out has absolutely nothing to do with how good a parent you are. Accepting this fact can make it far easier for parents to let go of the outcome for their children, and to let themselves “off the hook” for how their children turn out. All children must decide for themselves how they want their lives to go, and unfortunately, there's very little that parents can do to affect the choices that one's children make.

In fact, one of the things about severely traumatized children that has never ceased to amaze me over the years is that, regardless of how well they have done with their lives during childhood and adolescence, many of them seem to make choices as adults that end up with them living their lives as if they were still living with their birth parents. They choose boyfriends and girlfriends who abuse drugs and alcohol, and who often physically abuse them. They have great difficulty getting and keeping jobs, and often end up abusing drugs and alcohol themselves. This can be very frustrating for foster and adoptive parents because these children seemed to be doing relatively well as adolescents. I'm not quite sure how to explain why this seems to happen so often, but it appears to have most to do with the fact that the things that happen to children during the first year of life (and sometimes the things that happen during uterine life) have a very strong influence on children, and one that's extremely difficult for others to change later on in life. This doesn't mean that foster and adoptive parents should despair that their children can have a positive adult outcome. It's just that they shouldn't be too surprised if such a thing happens, even when they did the best job of parenting that they could.

When I was in nursing school back in the early 70's, we were taught that it didn't matter all that much what happened to children during early life. Children wouldn't remember the pain from early surgeries, and they could easily recover from any negative events. We now know that nothing could be further from the truth. We now know that the experiences of the first year of life have an enormous impact on children for the remainder of their lives, and that sometimes there is really nothing that later parents can do that will repair the damage that was done by the birth parents, regardless of how good of a job of parenting that they do, how much they love their foster/adoptive children, or how much support and nurturance they provide for their children. It's important that foster/adoptive parents become aware of this, and so can accept that their children are doing the best job that they can in dealing with their lives.

9) The Need to Mourn for the “Anticipated Child”

All parents have some ideas in advance of having children, whether by birth or through adoption or foster care, as to what those children will be like, whether or not they will be easy or difficult to raise, and what kinds of adults they will turn out to be. However, children don't always turn out to be the kinds of people that we thought they were going to be. My foster son was certainly a huge surprise for most of the foster parents with whom he lived, not to mention for the three potential adoptive families with whom he lived. I was better prepared for how he was going to be because I'd been his therapist for several years before he came to live with me. One of the things that I learned about parenting when I worked in the newborn nursery and the newborn intensive care unit was that, in order to be able to accept the children that come to them, parents first need to mourn for the loss of the children who the parents thought they were going to have. This was as true when children had only very minor problems such as a short frenulum (the skin under your tongue that connects your tongue to the bottom of your mouth; this needs to be cut at some point in early childhood when it's too short), as it was when children had very serious problems such as Down's Syndrome or severe breathing problems as a result of prematurity. Many parents seem to feel as if it's somewhat tacky to think of mourning for the loss of the anticipated child, as this somehow seems to blame the child for the problems that he/she has, but this is simply not true. Mourning for the loss of the anticipated child doesn't mean that parents need to spend hours or days crying, although this may be needed by a few parents. What it does mean is that many parents will at least need to acknowledge in some way that they were hoping for a different child, and are disappointed in the loss of that child. It can often hope to write a letter to the anticipated child which the parent then burns so that it NEVER falls into the hands of the child, for whom it could be potentially quite hurtful. The purpose of this letter is to allow the parent to express and release feelings that might otherwise be difficult for that parent to express, and then to be able to move on to fully love the child that the parents do have. Some parents choose to share their letters with each other, while others prefer to keep this private.

When parents have been unable to have birth children of their own, and are becoming foster or adoptive parents for this reason, there may be a particular need for them to mourn for the loss of the birth children who they wanted to have. How each parent, and each couple comes to terms with being unable to have birth children can be an easy, or a very difficult thing. For me, having had four miscarriages and a fetal demise at 22 weeks of pregnancy, the realization that I wasn't going to be able to have children from my own body was very painful (it was simply too painful for me to endure any additional miscarriages, so I decided not to try further pregnancies). I felt as though I was somehow deficient as a woman, as I couldn't do that one thing for which women are especially designed. It took some time for me to be able to work through these feelings, and to be able to grieve for the children that I had wanted to have; had looked forward to having since I was a child. To know that the names that I had chosen for those children would never be used, and that I would never see them grow up, would never know who they night have chose to become. All of these things were wounds that I needed to grieve for, and to heal, and many of you may find yourselves in a similar position, but might never have had anyone suggest to you that mourning for these children is okay, and may really help you a lot. So allow yourselves the opportunity to grieve for the children you thought you were going to have. It truly will make it easier for you to come to terms with having the children you do have.

10) Adopting From Overseas Doesn't Make it Less Likely that the Child Will Have Serious Emotional and Behavioral Problems

Many adoptive parents have the misconception that they are far less likely to adopt severely disturbed children if they adopt from foreign countries than they are if they adopt U.S. children. It would be nice if life was this simple, but this is Earth, and life is only very rarely simple here. Some parents also believe that they're less likely to get children with prenatal drug and alcohol exposure if they adopt from overseas, and this is also a misconception. In fact, most children adopted from Russia have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome of varying degrees of severity, since this is such an endemic problem in that society. Many children adopted from other eastern European countries, as well as from Central and South American countries have brain damage as a result of malnutrition. Children adopted from China often have serious attachment problems because the birth mothers stop bonding with them when they realize that they're having a daughter, and so will be putting her up for adoption. In addition, the Chinese government tends to place children for adoption at 9 months and 18 months of age, which are the heights for stranger anxiety and separation anxiety, both of which can create severe traumatization for children. Some countries have better orphanages than do others, but some children are simply stronger than others, while other children are by nature more easily damaged by the negative things that happen to them in life (as was discussed earlier in this course). And so, just like with birth children, there are no guarantees when you go about adopting children. You may luck out and get children who are survivors, and who adapt easily to change, or you may face more difficult challenges with children who don't adapt as easily. There are no simple answers to this equation, although I have often been asked over the years to look at video tapes of children in orphanages from countries all over the world and to give parents my opinion as to whether or not a given child is likely to be severely brain damaged or severely emotionally damaged by his/her early life experiences.

What I generally tell parents is that if you want some sort of guarantee that you're going to be more likely to get a healthy child, then adoption is probably not a good option for you and your family. Children, whether healthy or disturbed, are a gift from God. They belong to God and to themselves, and God loans them to you for 18 years, and prays that you don't mess them up too badly. If you decide that you want to raise someone's else's children, you need to do this without a concern for whether or not they will be healthy. Otherwise, don't do it. You won't be doing yourselves, or any children who might come to live with you, any favors if you only want to raise healthy children. And you need to remember that there are no guarantees about this issue even when you have birth children. There are all sorts of birth anomalies that can occur without any prior awareness that these exist. So, make a decision about whether or not you're willing to adopt, regardless of what might be going on with any children who you adopt. Or else make the decision that you'd rather not adopt because you don't feel prepared to parent children who may or may not have serious neurological and/or psychological problems.

And some parents seem to approach foreign adoption from the perspective that children are a returnable item. In other words, if they don't work out, you can simply send them back. Now I know that there are children in the world who simply aren't family material. They may sexually abuse your other children, set your house on fire, or engage in other behaviors that simply can't be tolerated in a family situation. This is the reason that I STRONGLY advocate that no foster or adoptive parent EVER tell a child that they will be living with your family forever -- that no matter what those children might do, they will always be your child because you will never send them away. Well, for some severely disturbed children, this is simply an invitation for them to treat you as horribly as they can. And I have sometimes had to advise parents to love a particular child “from afar” (meaning that the child no longer lives in the family home), because that child's behavior is such a danger to other members of the family. However, no parent should ever approach the process of adoption or foster care with the intention of getting rid of any children who don't work out (and I have known a number of adoptive parents who have approached adoption from this perspective). Again, if this is your perspective on adoption, then you would be better off choosing that adoption isn't really for you.

Some adoptive parents also have the misconception that if you get children young enough, this makes it much more likely that they won't be seriously damaged. This is also a fallacy, as some children are horribly damaged by their prenatal environment, and I have known a number of children who were adopted at birth or within the first few weeks of life who have very serious behavioral and emotional problems. So, you simply need to come to terms with the fact that there just are no guarantees when you become a parent, whether with birth children, or with foster or adoptive children. There are no countries with healthier children, or where you are less likely to adopt children with serious problems. This is because what determines whether or not children develop serious behavioral problems has as much to do with the intelligence and temperament of children as it does with what kinds of experiences they have during their early lives (as was discussed earlier in this course). I have known adopted children who have experienced horrendous abuse and neglect who somehow manage to survive these experiences relatively intact, and I have known adopted children who were never abused or neglected, and who had a relatively okay prenatal environment who have had very serious behavior and neurological problems. If you want guarantees about the health of children, then adoption really isn't a good option for you.
Some Final Thoughts

Some of you may now find yourselves wondering if becoming a foster or adoptive parent is really the right thing for you, now that you know what you know, and that is always the risk that is taken when potential foster/adoptive parents are provided with more complete information about what they're letting themselves in for. However, what I've found over the years is that very few potential parents actually decide not to adopt or become foster parents. Instead, what seems to happen is that parents feel far better prepared for the task that they're about to undertake, and that they tend to tighten their belts and ready themselves for what they now know may be the most challenging job that they will ever attempt. But they also know that there is hardly anything in this world that provides you with more satisfaction than the satisfaction that comes from holding a hurt child in your arms, knowing that you may not be able to make anything any better for them, but being there for them all the same. The ability to do this with love and compassion makes you, in my view, one of the angels who walks among us, and not one who waits for a reward in Heaven, or in some other life. Because even though all children may be unable to allow themselves to be loved, they all need to be loved, and they all deserve to experience unconditional love, despite the fact that they may simply lack any means for allowing any of that love inside of themselves. We don't withhold love because people don't know what to do with it. We give it anyway; freely, and with our hearts as open as we're able to make them at any given moment in time. We do this because we recognize that we are all in pain on some level or another, and that it is in the sharing of our common pain with one another that we become truly human. We comfort others in the face of their pain, and we allow others to comfort us when we ourselves are in pain. This is what binds us together as a species, and what lets us know that we truly belong. Not all of life's jobs are easy, or comfortable, or clean. Blessed are those of us who do life's difficult and dirty jobs without needing to ridicule or demean those whom we set out to help.

And so I certainly don't want to suggest to anyone that you should give up on becoming a foster or adoptive parent. On the contrary. I strongly encourage those parents who believe that they have what it takes to do a difficult job to do so. Being a foster parent has been a definite joy in my life. But it has also meant that I have never received a birthday card or mother's day card from either of my foster children. Fortunately, this doesn't bother me at all. In fact, the year that my son gave a mother's day card to my next door neighbor, I was happy that he seemed to be getting close to grasping the concept. He simply had a small geographical problem. It's possible that had he lived with me for another year, he would have overcome his geographical problem and gotten the card to my house. And then, of course, I had to strongly discourage my neighbor from forcing him to get me a mother's day card, which she wanted to do because she was so angry with him for getting her a card, but not getting me one. I just don't need that kind of approbation from my children in order to feel good about myself, or to feel that I'm being a good parent.

So, if you're considering becoming a foster or adoptive parent, what I hope is that you consider the points that were made in this course, and give deep thought or even prayer (if this is something that you do), to ask yourself if you have what it takes to parent severely traumatized children. Some of them are relatively easy to care for, and they fit easily into your family. Others have major problems, and will provide your family with many challenges along the way. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't take these children into your home. It simply means that you need to do so with what the medical profession refers to as “informed consent.” Foster care and adoption agencies are often afraid to give you this information, out of a concern that you'll drop out. I have more confidence in your courage and strength than they do. I have no doubt that those of you who are willing to do this job will do so, even when you are fully aware of how difficult it may be. Thank you.

On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 3:59 PM Jessica N. Kreitzer <jnkreitzer@gmail.com> wrote:

i’m doing some training hours to renew my foster license. Here is an excerpt from one of the trainings I am doing. I was thinking some of this may be what you experienced as a child.
Another interesting thing I learned, that seems really obvious once i read it, is that trauma is not reflective of what actually occured, trauma is based on the individual’s experience/emotional reaction/memory of what occured.

Here’s an excerpt:

From a neurochemical perspective (the chemicals in people's brains), severely traumatized children experience nearly constant very high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their brains, as they almost never relax, and are hyper-alert to danger in their lives. Cortisol as a molecule has a number of differently shaped, if you will, “male appendages” that can insert themselves into the receptor sites for a wide variety of neurochemicals. Because these receptor sites are already full of cortisol, there is no room in them for the neurochemicals that are supposed to be able to attach there (things like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, among a wide variety of others). As a result, the brains of severely traumatized children are limited in their ability to respond appropriately to a wide variety of life situations because they lack the necessary neurochemicals to be able to respond appropriately. This is also one of the reasons why these children don't respond well to antidepressants that work based upon blocking neuroreceptor sites from “re-uptaking” certain neurochemicals (Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Effexor, etc). High levels of cortisol also make it very difficult for brain cells to develop properly, and so contribute to the immaturity that's present in the brains of severely traumatized children.

From a physiological perspective, the bodies of severely traumatized children are also influenced by chronically high levels of cortisol. Eventually these very high levels of cortisol will result in a break-down of the immune systems of these children, but they tend to be remarkably healthy as young children, for reasons that are poorly understood. They tend to avoid getting the diseases that other family members are passing around among each other. One hypothesis about this has to do with their tending to have a stronger constitution, as weaker children who get severely neglected and abused simply die. However, there is no way to know if this is actually the reason why these children seem to be inordinately healthy. There is a tendency for these children to experience precocious puberty, most likely as a result of chronically high levels of cortisol, and this is especially true for children adopted from overseas, most likely because of the hormones in American meat that they are suddenly exposed to, as European and Asian countries don't use the hormones and antibiotics in raising their meat animals as the US does. Thus, it's not at all unusual for children from Russia and Romania to start puberty within six to twelve months of arriving in the US.

From a psychological perspective, virtually all severely traumatized children have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that ranges in severity from fairly mild to quite severe. The events that trigger PTSD for them are highly unpredictable, and often aren't picked up on by parents, as most of these children either become overly withdrawn and freeze, or act-out in some way, when they experience PTSD. As will be discussed in greater detail later in this lesson, about 90% of these children have a very distorted sense of what healthy attachment consists of, lack a healthy ability to engage in reciprocal interactions with others (and many of these children have absolutely no concept for basic reciprocal interactions with others), and commonly misunderstand and misinterpret the actions of others. As mentioned above, they often have great difficulty experiencing pleasure and joy, and so can appear to be depressed, and are usually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Also as mentioned above, a very high percentage of these children have seriously distorted (or even frankly psychotic) thinking, and about half of them have what used to be called Childhood (or Juvenile or Pediatric) Bipolar Disorder, which is now being called a Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (NOS). In addition, research has shown that close to 75% of severely traumatized children are highly anxious most of the time, usually about non-specific topics, and so have what is called a Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Finally, the vast majority of these children have a very negative self-image, and they tend to believe that they are “pond scum” and worthless, despite the fact that they are also often quite omnipotent, believing that they have abilities and intelligence far beyond what they actually have (something called grandiosity).--

I noticed during the past year and a half that I’m receiving more ads and FB page suggestions featuring black children, black dads, and black families. I’m sure that posting photos of my grandson

Josiyah has triggered algorithms that generate Black family focused memes, FB pages and ads.

And then once I click “like,love” as a response, more algorithms are triggered.. What I’ve learned

from those memes and FB pages and ads: I didn’t realize there were so many great Black dads

out there. I feel so guilty admitting this completely subconscious thought process. Congratulations

News in media and print media for fully indoctrinating me into having a certain expectation of

Black dads. Most common advertisements and popular magazines: Time, Newsweek People,

all major newspapers for focusing on Black men and crime etc etc The focus is on Black men in

sports, Black actors, Black men in music. I only this year learned about Black men and Black women

who are/were inventors, scientists in all categories, mathematical geniuses, classical musician

entrepreneurs. And yes, I started to “follow” Black history FB pages, Black entrepreneurs FB pages

as my curiosity has increased. It reminds me of when I was taking art history in college in my 30’s.

I didn’t realize that there were great female artists of the Renaissance

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