Continued from here ... If you don’t know why your child is raging, take your best shot. If your child has been raging for weeks, months or years, and up until now you have interpreted it as drama, you might be shocked at how changing your approach to the tantrum (eventually) changes the outcome. Label the origin of the tantrum as anything you know about your child’s past that would make any child angry. For an internationally adopted... more

A few posts ago I addressed the issue of tantrums. My favorite term for it is meltdown. I think that word adequately describes what is occurring in most cases.

One reader wondered how to differentiate between anger or sadness induced meltdowns versus those perhaps motivated by a need for drama. Another part of the reader’s question focused on how to access feelings after the meltdown.

We have all seen children who are “spoiled”... more

As I write this, my husband and Beth are at a concert listening to Neil Sedaka. OK, that dates me. But who cares. We bought Pops concert tickets last year when we were an immediate family of three. Now we are four. Our options for tonight’s concert were: Dad and daughters; Mom and daughters; Dad, Mom and one daughter (which would be Dora because I’m not leaving her with anyone, but would leave Beth at a friend’s house). I had decided on Dad and daughters, because I am absolutely toast after a very long, hard week. Ah, but the best laid plans ... Dora’s week culminated in the meltdown... more

I’ve struggled to get blogs written these past few days, as Dora is having a rough week. Reality has really set in. The novelty of being here is wearing off and the realization that she is really living in another family and not “just visiting” is hitting her quite hard. We had two long, hard sessions in the rocking chair today, with Dora dealing with her mad and sad in the safety of my arms. She asked to rock this morning before we did much of anything else. It was a harbinger of things to come.

A reader recently asked, “what form does the purging take?” The... more

My freshly manicured hands are now full of blisters after having cotton rope pulled through them by a horse determined not to get in our trailer. This is really a neat horse—very well mannered, willing to please, very low-key. He’s simply convinced he won’t fit in our trailer and he’s afraid. We tried the “my way or the highway” approach (not dissimilar from what we tried in July for four long hours) and it simply didn’t work. I hated it, too. He wasn’t being belligerent … he was afraid.

So here’s what we did. We put my horse trailer in our round pen... more

I have quoted Katherine Leslie several times in this blog, including this post where she talks about measuring your child’s positive and negative behaviors on two scales instead of one. So instead of saying, “My child exhibits 60% positive behaviors and 40% negative behaviors” you could actually have a child that gets a six or seven on the negative scale and six or seven on the positive scale. Katherine believes... more

As I discussed in my last post, one of the most critical keys to successful therapeutic parenting is to provide the sense of structure and stability that allows your child to relax and leave you in charge. To do this, you can’t be reactive, you must be proactive.

You must always be thinking ahead of your child. You must anticipate how the day will unfold and do your best to circumvent all the potential pitfalls... more

I had a great conversation the other day with a mom who has a nine-year-old boy adopted from Eastern Europe. This is a mom who works with other families who also adopted from EE. We talked about that pervasive thing—denial—that so many parents experience when it comes to recognizing and/or acknowledging the degree of trauma and attachment issues in their kids. This mom admitted that she and her husband thought her son had attached just fine, but now, at age nine, they are realizing he has many issues.

So how... more

My last post was in response to a poignant series of questions by a reader who is struggling with some very difficult kids. In her response to my post, she elaborated that she had two tough kids, making the line-of-sight supervision even harder. She says they recognize the difficulty the mom has in micromanaging two kids, stating … “They use those fleeting unsupervised seconds (and I do mean seconds) to destroy property,... more

A most exciting email crossed my desk this morning. As I have repeatedly mentioned, I spoke to a group of Rotarians last Monday, even as the tragedy in Vermont was unfolding. I talked about the consequences of a child never forming a strong attachment to an adult. I talked about “blue babies”—kids who cry so fiercely and so long in their bid for attention that they turn blue. And I wondered aloud where that rage goes when no one comes to them? In many kids, it goes inward, only to manifest itself in some truly pathological way down... more