Meeting Four: Helping Children With Attachments
This was one of the most interesting topics so far. The information packets taught me a lot about bonding and attachments. It's giving me a new perspective and showing me that I cannot use all of my effective teaching methods from my own childcare experiences. I have to use very different methods with children who are going through the foster care system.
-Children cannot grow up normally unless they have a continuing stable relationship, an attachment to at least one nurturing adult.
-Removing children and putting them in foster care is extremely damaging to children because it disrupts the basic developmental process of attachment to a particular adult.
-The very young child who loses a parent goes into a grief process.
-Adults typically take one to two years to go through the grief cycle, but young children can take half of their childhood. Removing a child from a parent or foster parent to whom he is attached has an effect similar to a loss by death; it initiates a grief process.
What happens, then, to children coming into foster care or adoption?
First of all, there are apt to be short-term memory deficits. These children typically are not processing information well. You tell them something; they don't remember a thing. You think, "Why is he doing this to me? Why is he not doing anything he is asked?" You say to him, "You told me 15 minutes ago that you were going to do this and you haven't done it!" He says, "You never told me!" He really doesn't remember. He literally forgets, because his short-term memory isn't processing well. When short-term memory isn't processing well, long-term memory is also effected, which means he doesn't learn to read well. Many foster and adoptive children are learning disabled. It is probably not because they were born with the disability or due to brain damage. It is more likely that the process of grief is disrupting short-term memory. Developmental delay is common to foster children. The grief process has disrupted their ability to develop and learn.
A second issue is the children's sense of who they are. We all need to know where we started and how we started and developed in order to have a story about ourselves. We know we were born in a certain place; we grew up in a certain place; these were our parents; there were our brothers and sisters;that was the school we went to; these were the teams we played on; these were our friends. Foster children tend to not remember clearly. Foster children don't know which of these four or five families they lived with are the actual birth parents. Many remember the family they were living with at about age four. That could have been their third foster family, but they sometimes think it is their birth family. Maybe they only stayed there a month, but they suddenly get it into their head, "that person is my mother." Yet they have other memories that don't quite fit. They remember three or four different dogs and all those siblings; they're not sure which are theirs and which belong to someone else. And the big question: why were they here?
Suddenly, instead of a consistent story about who they are, they have a history with confusion in it. They don't know where they came from. It is not unusual for foster children to think they came full grown, that they did not grow inside a mother, and that they were not born. Some foster children under eight or nine will tell you they were never born, that they just came, that they somehow appeared in a foster home at about age three.
These children have an exceedingly difficult time reattaching to a family when they are adopted, because they cannot attach and go through a process of separation from what has happened to them in the past. They can't do it because they don't understand what's happened. It's very important to reduce the number of different families these children experience. It is also important that we communicate to them very clearly about everything that has happened to them.
The last issue is behavior. The behavior of foster and adoptive children many times indicates a grief process. Some of the first behaviors you see are denial and bargaining. Often there is a "honeymoon period" where children coming into care will be very good for a few weeks. That's a combination of denial and bargaining. "If I'm really good they will let me go home." "If I'm really good my mother will love me." Most times the children feel they did something wrong. "If I had not thought those bad things about my parents, then the sheriff wouldn't have picked me up."
There are a lot of common behaviors in denial. One is very rhythmic behavior. Children my skip rope continuously, bounce a basketball, kick the wall, or sit with toys making noise. Adults do not usually recognize this kind of rhythmic behavior as a grief response. The child feels that if he keeps running or banging the wall, he won't have to deal with the hurt.
The anger of these children is often very serious and there is a great deal of acting out of their behavioral problems. What wouldn't normally bother a child will bother these children. They are angry about disconnections, angry about the detachments. They go through the stages of grief. In the depression stage you have children who are not sad or crying, but with very little energy. These kinds of behaviors, typical of foster and adoptive children, are really indications to us that they are grieving. We need to treat them as people in grief, to do grief work with them.
Adults don't have to be attached to children. Adults don't have to be attached to one another. We like to be attached to our spouses, but we are not going to die without it. We may go through grief, but we are not going to go through all kinds of developmental problems. Children must be attached. They simply must. They cannot develop normally without being attached to one adult over a period of time because their whole sense of safety, their whole sense of the world, their whole sense of learning depends on it.
How can we help?
One of the biggest ways to help is by creating a Life Book with pictures and drawings. A Life Book documents the child's life, starting at the very beginning. It is a combination of a story, diary, and a scrapbook. Even if it's not a story the child likes, it is still a story about who he is and is an important part of his identity. He can then begin to detach from all that hurt and all that grief, and begin to make a more positive attachment to his adoptive family. Otherwise he may never be able to reattach.
The best time to begin a Life Book is when a child comes into the foster care system, when birth family and child's developmental and family history information are more available. The Life Book is developed with the child, not for the child, if the child is old enough to participate.
Information for a Life Book may be collected from:
-Case Records (possibly from numerous agencies)
-Birth Parents
-Foster Parents
-Grandparents or Other Relatives
-Previous Social Workers
-Hospital Where Born
-Medical Personnel
-Previous Neighbors
-Teachers and Schools
-Court Records
-Newspapers
-School Pictures
-Policemen (who have had contact with the family)
-Church and Sunday School Records
The Life Book could be divided into sections including:
-Birth Information ~ Birth Certificate, Weight, Height, Special Medical Information, and Picture of the Hospital
-Birth Family Information ~ Pictures and Description of Birth Family, Names and Birth Dates of Parents, Genogram, and Siblings (Names, Birth Dates, and Where They Are), Occupational/Educational Information About Birth Parents, Any Information About Extended Family
-Placement Information ~ Pictures of Foster Family or Families, List of Foster Homes (Names and Locations), Names of Other Children in Foster Homes to Whom the Child Was Especially Close, Names of Social Workers (and Pictures if Possible)
-Medical Information ~ List of Clinics and Hospitals, Immunization Records, Any Medical Information That Might Be Needed By the Child as They Grow Up, Height/Weight Changes, Loss of Teeth, When Walked, Talked, etc
-School Information ~ Names of Schools, Pictures of Schools and Friends, Report Cards, and School Activities
-Religious Information ~ Places of Worship Child Attended, Confirmation and Baptism Records, Papers and Other Material From Sunday School
-Other Information ~ Pictures of the Child at Different Ages of Development, Stories About the Child From Birth Parents, Foster Parents, and Social Workers, Accomplishments, Awards, Special Skills, Likes and Dislikes
Lesson #6: A Life Book will increase a child's self-esteem, provides a way for the child to share his or her past with others, and helps the adoptive family's understanding of the child's past to help the child develop a positive identity.
