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Parents of Reactive Attachment Disorder kids are caught in a bind. On the one hand, few of us just happen to have within our circle of intimates close friends who are also parenting RAD kids. On the other hand, we need a lot of support from our friends exactly because we are parenting in such a challenging situation. What do we do? I talk to the counselor weekly, but when I'm out with the girls, and we're talking about our lives, if I'm going to participate, I have to talk about what's really going on with me. When I do, I run up against frames of reference that may have almost no overlap with mine. Case in point. I went to dinner with… [more]

We reached the end of the road with my seventeen-year-old son who will not do his school work. We've tried peanut butter sandwiches instead of yummy food until his work is turned in. We even tried charging him $50 per missing assignment out of his part-time job paycheck. He cried when he had to pay us $200 then turned around and paid us another $150 for three more missing assignments. So did he really care? I don't think so. The final strategy--and this sounds draconian, but we were trying to get his attention--was to drive him to a motel and tell him we were paying for a thirty-day stay, and when he was getting close to the end of the… [more]

I'm not sure what special needs my ten-year-old has. He was two-plus when we adopted him, so by definition, he has "special needs." Clearly he's never met a rule he wanted to follow or a boundary he wanted to respect. But he's so cute. At first the therapist thought he was just spoiled, as in, you've been distracted by the problems of his older siblings, and he's so cute, he's been allowed to get away with too much for too long. That was hard to believe. I'm a very strict mom. My own mother called me Captain von Trapp without the whistle. She meant it in the nicest possible way I'm sure. So initially we worked on the temper tantrums and disobedience… [more]

I am so very frustrated with my seventeen-year-old son. Ever since we adopted him nine years ago, he pulls the same stunt a dozen times a school year. He lies, says he doesn't have homework, ends up with multiple missing assignments which he must then make up, and digs himself a deep dark hole of no TV, no Playstation, and no friends while he catches up. In nine years, he has had only two or three real holiday breaks from school because he usually has to spend all that time catching up. We've tried counseling, heavy structure, essays to help him connect with the feelings that drive this behavior, meetings with teachers, positive rewards when he stays caught up, and negative consequences… [more]

I was driving my ten-year-old somewhere this week, and he piped up from the backseat, "It's kind of like you're my birth mom." At a stoplight I turned around with a huge smile on my face and said, "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me!" We started fostering Justin and his two older siblings when he was sixteen months old and they were eight and five. Two years later, we adopted all three. Even though he is the only one that has no conscious memories of the birth parents, he has been the only one to obsess over being adopted. He has worried that it makes him different. He has worried that he doesn't look like us. That one is almost… [more]

It is SO frustrating to be my daughter's mom for nine, count 'em nine, years, and she STILL won't come to me with a problem. I know all the background about brains that didn't form vital connections, fight or flight, reactive attachment disorder, fetal alcohol impaired social skills and so forth. But when you work for nine years to establish trust and things were going so well, even innocent betrayal hurts. I recently threw myself under the bus for my daughter. I protected her like a mama bear from two girl bullies-posing-as-friends and one mom-of-a-bully who silently mouthed the word "liar" to my daughter as bully number one shrieked at me that my daughter was lying about the bullying. Okay, enough set-up… [more]

I'm a little late posting this week because we had a tragic death of a thirteen-year-old girl in our neighborhood, a friend of my daughter's. We won't know what happened until they finish investigating, but her parents found  her dead in the bathtub last Monday  morning. Our close-knit community folded in around the family who still has one adopted and four biological siblings. I had the honor of sitting with the mother two days after her daughter's death, the day she went into her daughter's bedroom for the first time since the drowning. I say it was an honor because it felt like a sacred space to be there as she unleashed her agony and to be able to hold some of… [more]

RAD kids live to wear you down. They think they're going to succeed, and often they do. Who can stand up to the abuse 24/7 for years on end? You can. Pick one or two things at a time and focus like a laser. Bring all you have to bear on those behaviors. And then never give up no matter how hard they test you and try you. My ten-year-old son has not played with friends in over two months. In order to play with friends, he must contain his temper tantrums so that he screams into his "angry pillow" only (not our ears) and stomps the floor or hits the pillow on the bed. If he contains his temper tantrum… [more]

My daughter spent an entire week in the bathroom (except for school and church) rather than shifting. She actually wrote essays about how she liked being in the bathroom because she didn't have to do any chores, or deal with her annoying brothers. Saddest of all, she said she was glad to be in the bathroom because she didn't have to face not having any friends. Our therapist said Kaylyn had forgotten what she was missing. She directed me and my husband to spend time with Kaylyn in the bathroom playing cards, telling her how much we missed her at dinner, and even giving her candy from time to time just because we love her. Then, after a sweet half an hour or… [more]

Well, the chess game version. Nobody's going to get hurt or killed and sooner or later, I'm sure there will be a happy ending. Have you ever felt like you needed to lose a few pounds, and then you didn't, and you were so mad you ate EXTRA ice cream? I think that's where my daughter is, emotionally speaking. She was doing so well, may I emphasize SO WELL. Then, like everybody else, she had a bad day which she used to open yet another fake Facebook account. Not in a sneaky way where she was sure not to get caught this third time. No, in the same exact way she was caught the first two times, by opening it on her school-issued laptop… [more]