Reactive Attachment Disorder

So I gave my seventeen-year-old son the driver's wheel on his high school education. Not because I wanted to, but because what I was doing wasn't working. Supervising him closely and catching all his missing assignments for him to complete just caused him to lie to me and let me be his safety net. With the counselor's agreement, I took my hands off the wheel, and he is succeeding or failing on his own. Initially he became uber-responsible, skipping lunch at Arby's with his friends so that he could go to the library and catch up on work. He came home a week ago saying he no longer had an F in History. I asked him how he managed that. He said he… [more]

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]

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]

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]

We work so hard to get our RAD kids to attach to us, and we inevitably attach to them as we all heal. Then they do something RAD, and we're supposed to understand, parent with pizzazz, and keep going. I do understand, I of course keep going, but my pizzazz has fizzled, at least momentarily. My daughter and I were doing so well. I backed her when a friend (and the friend's mom) accused Kaylyn of lying. I was so proud of her for standing up to bullies. We were enjoying each other, and I felt so encouraged. Then I discovered that Kaylyn had created a third (yes, the third time) fake identity on Facebook. I felt like I'd been kicked in the… [more]

For the first time in nine years, I had to call the police for one of my children. Well, I take that back. There was that time my oldest son, fifteen at the time, stole fireworks and a lighter from the hardware store. In that case, the police referred me to the cop on his high school campus (who spent the whole meeting with us and the school counselor telling my son he wasn't in trouble). In any event, this was the first time I called the police for active behavior problems. And this time for my ten-year-old. All the treatment professionals in my son's life, plus his teacher, plus his parents have been conducting an Eradicate-Temper-Tantrums-Now mission. At the last doctor's appointment… [more]

So said the counselor about my ten-year-old son, my "baby" whom I've had since he was sixteen months old. Somehow she had missed me telling her that he tantrums at least once a day and has for several years. She said if she had known, she would have been working with him since May like she has with his siblings, my fourteen-year-old daughter and my seventeen-year-old son. I think it was a blessing in disguise that we were only focused on two at a time. I can't imagine adding one more kid to the summer of torture that we went through last year. Now that the older two are doing so well, and we have such confidence in the counselor… [more]