Before I became a foster and adoptive parent, eight years
ago, I didn’t really understand how neglect and abuse hurt kids.
Before I paint myself as too dim, let me explain. Certainly,
Bill and I decided to become foster parents because we understood that children
are hurt by neglect and abuse. It saddened and angered us that so many children
in our city were in need of a safe and healthy family, so we looked around our
house and within our hearts and found room in both places to welcome a couple of
children. But I can admit now, that even as we welcomed each daughter, we
didn’t have an understanding of the science that explains exactly how abuse and neglect harms children. We
knew abused and neglected children are hurt children, but we did not understand
the effect of trauma on the human brain in terms of its ability to form healthy
and lasting relationships.
We do now.
When a baby is born, every need met by that baby’s parent or
caregiver teaches the baby that it is safe to attach to the parent or
caregiver. The baby cries, mom offers a breast: the baby learns she will be
taken care of. The baby cries, dad picks him up; the baby learns he will be
protected. This pattern is repeated thousands of times in a child’s first year
in a healthy family.
A child of neglect or abuse is a child who has learned just
the opposite. She cries and Mom does not come to feed her; he feels scared and
he remains alone. Like the child from the healthy family, a child from a
neglectful home has this pattern repeated thousands of times. Needs unmet, over
and over again.
What the child from the neglectful home learns is that he or
she must rely only on him or herself to survive. Adult caregivers cannot be
trusted.
The longer the neglect or abuse goes on, the more entrenched
this belief becomes so that even when a child is removed from an orphanage or a
dysfunctional home to a home with healthy, caring parents, the child’s brain
cannot readily make the leap that now he or she is safe.
Children from neglected homes may hoard food because they
don’t believe they will be adequately fed; they may become defiant to parents
or teachers because they can’t trust anyone beside themselves with decisions;
they may avoid eye contact; they may tantrum; they may become indiscriminately
friendly with those they barely know. The child of abuse or neglect wants
nothing more than to maintain control—because he or she has learned that
protection comes from only from within herself, not from the caregiver.
The experts put a vocabulary around what happens to children
of abuse and neglect the centers on the word “attachment.” Children are said to
have a disrupted attachment, or an attachment disorder, or in the most severe
cases, a reactive attachment disorder (RAD).
Once a child is removed from an abusive or neglectful home,
the new parents need to rebuild the attachment the child missed. The parents need to assess where the child is
on the attachment spectrum and parent (and re-parent) accordingly, using
specific intentional and therapeutic methods of parenting that have been shown
to be successful. Lullabies and rocking; games that build eye contact; time-ins
next to the parent, rather than time-outs; methods of discipline and ways of
phrasing questions and commands that lead to compliance and the turning over of
control.
Because one of our daughters was twice removed from and
returned to the home of her biological parent before the court determined ours
should be her permanent home, we have been immersed in the world of disrupted
attachment for about three years now.
And while much of what has happened in these three years has
been painful and exhausting, the lessons I have learned while working through
my daughter’s healing process have all come back to Jesus’ command to love. Love
is an action and a decision, not an emotion. When Jesus said, “Love one another
as I have loved you,” he invited us to look at how he loved people—and it was
through teaching and healing. Jesus was all about building attachment.
Our experience of foster care has been a daily challenge to
live the command to love—to believe that the action of loving will lead to
transformation of the one who is loved.
Foster care has brought us to levels of love as a family
that I would not have known we were capable of. On our better days, you could
say we are skilled lovers. The parenting techniques we’ve had to develop to be
effective with our foster daughter have benefited our biological sons and
adopted daughter as well. In an effort to heal her disrupted attachment, we’ve
all become closer
Eight years ago, Bill and I didn’t really understand how
abuse and neglect hurt kids. Looking back, sometimes I feel ashamed of our
naïveté. More often, though, I am thankful for it. Because if we would have
known what we’d be up against, maybe we would not have chosen foster care at
all. And had we not chosen foster care, we would never have learned how deeply
and how intentionally we could love, when required to.
And we would have missed out on two of the four best gifts
in our lives.
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