One of the advantages to moving is that you get to find and organize all kinds of stuff you forgot you had. In the past, my office was short on storage space, so much of my sewing and ADN “stuff” was stored in two closets upstairs… making it very difficult to easily access books and fabric. Not so at our new house… the plan called for a huge master bedroom closet. We added a second closet for my husband (I vowed never to share closet space with him again after we built our first house in the early 90’s!) and added a door from the office into the closet.... more

I decided to do another installment of my commentary on the article by Dr. Richard Delaney. As I mentioned when I started this series, I emailed many of my associates and asked for their feedback on this article as well. I was not sure if my response reflected the response of other foster and adoptive parents in my circle. I must say, however, we are all on the same page...at least among those I polled.

In delineating the problems with “maverick attachment therapy”, Delaney argues against the belief that it is... more

Taking a bit of a break from working my way through the article in Fostering Families magazine, I wanted to share about a woman I read about in Reader’s Digest. (I love that magazine… I can read different things in small bytes which is about all the time I seem to have!)

The article is titled Breaking the Silence, and it is about Wafa Sultan. The subtitle of the article states: One woman is risking her life to speak the truth about radical Islam. The article describes how Wafa, a physician... more

Continued from here...

There were several paragraphs in the article that discussed the “Basic German Shepherd” approach and the “boot camp” mentality. Dr. Delaney states that, “While there is great merit for children, disturbed and undisturbed, to have humane, reasonable rules, structure, guidance and predictability, lock-step compliance training is not advisable.”

There are aspects of that statement that I agree... more

Continuing on with my discussion about the article in Fostering Families magazine...

Part One Part Two Part Three

When my husband and I discussed this article and the whole “attachment... more

Moving on through the article, the prerequisite mentioning of “children dying” because of attachment therapy makes its appearance. No article negating the validity of attachment therapy would be complete without this point. Yes, I know bad things have happened. Yes, I know a FEW therapists—a VERY few as far as I know—made bad choices that had grave consequences. And yes, I know that a FEW parents have taken what therapists have said and twisted it around and misused it. But I am incredibly tired of hearing how many zillions of kids have... more

Dr. Delaney begins by addressing the misuse of the RAD diagnosis (a subject he and I discussed a year ago), and … “the swelling controversy about maverick, ‘coercive’ attachment therapies and parenting approaches.”

He mentions the APSAC report (see previous blogs about that) and quotes the report in their concern about how “most foster or adoptive parents are probably unaware of the risks and poor foundation for some treatment claims.”

The next point in the article acknowledges that while “some approaches are controversial,... more

How many of you receive or have heard of the magazine Fostering Families? In the NovDec issue that just arrived in my mailbox, there were several articles that related to attachment and/or mental health issues.

One such article was written by Richard Delaney, PhD. The article was titled Fostering Changes, which is the same title he used for a book... more

Arrggghh!! I spent another frustrating day dealing with computer issues. This morning while trying to address the switching of ADN’s website from one server to another, the ADN phone line was “connected” but so static-filled as to be unusable. When I tried to call someone else later, I couldn’t get it to connect. And then I had no dial tone at all.

After talking to THREE support reps, connecting and reconnecting power to the phone adapter, the modem and my router (repeatedly), reconfiguring the router and adapter... more

In Part Two of the APSAC report, I shared the part of the report that essentially blames parents, yet again, and implies that a child who “gets along with” people in their peripheral environment but NOT in their family environment is always the victim and never the victimizer. That sure runs counter to one of Tommy and Amy’s many therapists who described adding an attachment-challenged child to a healthy family as “injecting a pathogen into the family.”

The folks who wrote the APSAC report are clearly believers in the DSM-IV and the multitude of... more