When you adopt an older special needs child things don’t always go as wonderfully as you might have imagined before adopting or fostering. Before adopting or fostering an older child, you may daydream about cooking, playing, and just spending time together. You make hundreds of plans that you cannot wait to fulfill with your new child. Then your traumatized child arrives home. Your child is resistant to bonding because of past hurts and abuse. Your child tries to sabotage the placement rather than risk being rejected again. You find family heirlooms broken, feces painted... more

My 14-year-old adopted daughter seems to be making huge efforts lately to do the exact opposite of whatever I say. She has even taken it to the ridiculous level of not doing things she wants to do that are good. For example, I went through the McDonalds drive thru the other day. As the employee handed me the drinks, I handed them back to the children. Most of them stood up and grabbed their drinks. Most stood up, except for my 14-year-old daughter of course. She refused to take off her seatbelt and stand up and she was in the second to the last bench seat in our 15-passenger... more

Children who come home to their forever family at an age older than a newborn are at increased risk for attachment disorders. These children have at least lived with their birth parents, foster family, orphanage, or multiple placements. Broken attachments cause trauma in children. Trauma can lead to attachment issues. If you place a child with attachment issues into a family with two working parents, you risk increasing their trauma. These children are already struggling with abandonment issues. What goes through their little heads each day when they are... more

When you think about special moments spent bonding with your newly adopted daughter, does teeth brushing come to mind? I wrote a blog a couple of months ago about our 10-year-old daughter finally getting her braces. Here is the link if you want some background. Has Your Adopted Daughter Dreamed of Braces? She was a bit young to have braces but she had lost all of her baby teeth. Her excitement helped to rush the process a little. I have never met anyone so ecstatic about getting braces.... more

Have you adopted an older child either from foster care or internationally? If you have, does your child smother friendships? Many of these children suffer from low self-esteem. Therefore, they feel the need to buy friendships. One of my adopted daughters took gifts to a friend every week. They were not expensive gifts. She took things she had made like beaded jewelry, key chains, or bookmarks. She took personal belongings such as lip-gloss or lotion. After several weeks, her friend began to think her behavior was strange. That is when I found out about... more

Living with a passive aggressive adopted child makes everyday a little more interesting. The unexpected becomes the expected after a few years. The strange and unusual become quite normal at least in your world. It is true; the shock begins to wear off. You are left with sort of a resigned acceptance. After a while, you may even give up reprimanding your child. After all, you are just wasting your breath and amusing your child. Consequences, justice, and remuneration mean nothing to the passive aggressive adopted child. Really, your only hope of stopping the deliberate destruction... more

I just commented on one of Marie’s blogs last week about this, “It's Not Always About Adoption!” I confessed to Marie that after 14 years of foster care and adoption I sometimes still cannot tell the difference between an adoption issue and a child issue. I made the wrong call today, a couple of times. Bring out the crow; I’ll eat it for supper. My 10-year-old daughter, adopted in November, was having quite a day. I thought her behavior was passive aggressive. Yup, I thought she was... more

Note: Continued blogs about my memory of parenting LuLu/seeking help.

I was so excited to be at the ATTACh conference. It was like a huge “shopping mall” of people versed in attachment and trauma. While I had been reading for years, and crossed the country in search of a therapist, here was a treasure of information in one place. This was 2001, before I had connected with Nancy Spoolstra (I knew her in cyberspace, but hadn’t connected with her organization, ATN).

In each workshop I learned more and more. But two workshops were especially... more

Spurred on by our early success in getting LuLu to talk, we decided attachment was her major issue and began searching for another attachment therapist. This quest took us to a professional out of our state for an intensive. LuLu made much progress, and my hopes were high. Her hours of sleeping increased to about four hours at a time without waking, although rarely more than eight hours total in a whole day.

But I was floundering in juggling the demands of being the kind of therapeutic mom I needed to be along with working full-time. Less than a year... more

We were perplexed by what the professionals at the international adoption clinic had to say. But I had found another source of information that was giving me a different perspective. An adoptive mom who was studying to become a therapist was organizing a list serve now known as Attach-China. What she and others were reporting there sounded so much like my daughter’s issues. I was happy to find someone who was seeing similar issues with sleep, language, rages and odd behaviors.

It’s hard to remember the exact steps I took next. But the more I delved into attachment... more