Don’t you hate it when middle-aged moms try to sound cool? I know my teenaged daughter does. I was going to write "Homeys", but was informed Peeps was more “in”…being slang for People.

Friday night Super Dad and I joined several other parents at a dinner one of the awesome moms of challenging kids organizes for us each month. This group is comprised of adoptive/foster parents of traumatized children. The alphabet soup of diagnoses apply. And even though each and every child is completely different, unique and challenging in his/her behaviors and issues, there is much commonality among the group. These parents are definitely my “peeps” – people who are living lives very similar to my own.

It’s great to be out for dinner without kids. Although Friday night’s theme seemed to be babysitter challenges. One couple had to bring the kids, due to babysitter cancellation, others reported last minute substitutions, and ours was late getting here…making us late to the dinner.

The other common theme for last Friday’s dinner appeared to be difficulty with public schools…or just educating our traumatized little ones in general. Nearly every parent there had experienced a school-related challenge in the last few months. Each one was different, but there were similar themes. Here’s how I’d categorize the similar themes:

1. School’s misunderstanding of trauma/inability to recognize and respond. More and more families report that the teachers and administrators just do not understand signs of trauma being triggered in our kids. The children who quietly dissociate are often ignored and the ones who lash out are labeled as behavior problems. Self-injury, destruction of their own clothing, nail biting…all of these things are clues that a child who can become explosive is doing so because of internal anxiety…anxiety often associated with past trauma being triggered.
2. Inability to recognize other disabilities/issues. The most common of those (in my opinion) are processing difficulties, be they sensory, auditory, visual or language. Schools often don’t have a solid way to detect, let alone service and remediate, processing disorders. And so many of our children have them. Because much of the trauma falls into the category of pre-verbal and early childhood abuse, neglect and maltreatment greatly impacts brain development and processing abilities, it’s no surprise many traumatized children have processing disorders. Unlike distinctly classified learning disabilities, processing disabilities often are overlooked by school systems. And what’s definitely overlooked is the effect on the child’s behaviors from these processing deficits.
3. discontinuing services as quickly as possible. I don’t know if this is endemic in other parts of the country, but in our state it seems to be a common occurrence…if the child qualifies for speech, OT or other services, do whatever you have to do to disqualify him as soon as possible. Parents report to me over and over that the school wants to discontinue services, with little to no data saying the child has improved, and often despite evaluations showing definite disability.
4. The parents must be crazy. There are two main variations of this theme. The parent who is pushing the school to recognize the trauma or other disabilities the child is exhibiting (or not exhibiting if they are dissociating) is looked on as overprotective, hovering, neurotic. I’ve even heard of school systems accusing parents of having Munchausen by Proxy. The parent whose child is exhibiting attachment disorder and all the charming triangulation that can be involved with that is viewed as cold, angry and uninvolved, maybe even abusive. As the parent tries to put the accountability upon the child for school work, they are often viewed as punitive and unreasonable. In other words…overinvolved or underinvolved…you’re likely to be labeled one way or the other.

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