A Day in the Life ...

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]

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]

A friend of mine recently admitted she felt like a failure because her little RADish didn’t seem to be making much progress and it was having an effect on her family, her marriage, and herself.  She was struggling to remain loving and supportive because her RADish was taking everything she had to give. Being the mother of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder is beyond exhausting.  I would say being a parent in itself is a tiring job, but when the complexities of an emotionally damaged child is added in, exhaustion doesn’t go far enough to describe how you feel at the end of the day. Nancy Thomas wrote a book about RAD called When Love is Not Enough.  This was the first book… [more]

…Buy yourself a cupcake. The start of this New Year has not been an easy one around our house.  With two daughters in full-blown RAD mode, our family life has not been chaos-free. One prevalent behavior of Reactive Attachment Disorder is lying.  All children fib and stretch the truth, but children suffering from RAD have perfected the art of lying to such a level, the lies should be hanging in a museum. Elle, my 13 year old RADish, is so proficient at lying I’m not sure she knows how to tell the truth.  The hard part about the lying is you know they are doing it because your built-in lie detector is flashing red.  But how are you going to prove it?  Should you try? … [more]

Sometimes the smallest things can speak volumes. In my house, the disappearance of a carrot peeler doesn’t mean that I’ve misplaced it in the wrong drawer.  It is a red flag that one of my daughters is angry.  Angry at me. Parenting a child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD.) is not easy.  Parenting is not easy, but when your child has attachment issues that result in a lack of trust, simply loving your child is often not enough. RAD is a disorder of relationships, and the root cause of the disorder is the broken mother/child relationship.  Until this basic, fundamental relationship is restored with the adoptive mother, the child will be incapable of forging normal, healthy relationships. I have spent years trying to repair my relationship… [more]

You can never truly understand a person until you have walked a mile in their shoes.  I don’t know what it’s like to be adopted, or to be given up at birth, and I don’t know what it’s like to have reactive attachment disorder (RAD). I know what it’s like to be an adoptive parent, and I know what it’s like to be a parent of a child with RAD, but I don’t understand what goes on in her head when she is raging out of control. I take Bunny to therapy once a week, I’ve taken Elle to RAD camp, and I am an AWESOME RAD mom, but as much as I say the right things and parent in a strong and… [more]

"It is so hard to watch all of the "normal" families." " I Hate when everyone always stares at us." " I had no idea how horrible this would be." "Why is she trying to ruin our family." "It know it is not his fault but..."These are all comments that I hear daily from parents who are struggling to survive life with a RAD child. I know that it feels like you are being punished, I know that there is guilt about regretting your decision to parent a child with RAD. The most important thing to realize is that all of these thoughts and feelings are normal. RAD is an unfair sentence that is given to the most helpless children. These are the… [more]

We had Bunny in therapy last Friday and we were discussing her recent round of temper tantrums and struggles for control.  Lately, she has been sneaking out of the house and not telling anyone where she is going or what she is doing.  On 20 acres of pasture and woodland, a little six year old is likely to get into a lot of trouble, so you see why we’ve been getting upset. Especially now that the coyotes have had their spring pups, and we have killed two copperhead snakes in the last two weeks.  We don’t worry so much about Elle, because she always has her dog as her constant companion and she wears a pair of leather cowboy boots to protect her… [more]

When I became a parent, I never knew a useful skill would be managing a rollercoaster ride.  One day Elle is having a bad day and she is at the bottom, but Bunny is riding at the top.  Twenty-four hours later, Bunny is scraping the bottom and Elle is flying high. But, it’s not only the ups and downs of one child versus the other; it’s the pendulum swing back and forth in a single child.  For seven years, we’ve dealt with RAD’s effect on Elle.  There were times that we were so far down on the bottom of the rollercoaster; I thought we had permanently derailed.  There was a time I was convinced we would only see her during weekly visits to… [more]

I was at the gym the other day and I was watching a few mothers in the locker room with their children.  One mother was trying to juggle a baby on the floor, brush a toddler’s hair, and manage a little boy who refused to sit still.  I had empathy for the young mother because I couldn’t imagine having three kids, let alone three children so close in age. There was also another mother with her three-year-old daughter.  The little girl kept asking her mother question, after question, after question.  I could feel the frustration emanating off the young woman and I saw some of myself in her face.  The little girl wanted to comb her own hair, but kept asking how… [more]