Raging and meltdowns

Emotions and feelings shouldn’t be a hard thing, although ask any man in an all-female household and he will tell you he is screwed when it comes to feelings and emotions. My husband once questioned our six-year-old daughter, Bunny, about the outfit she chose to wear for picture day.  His question was less about what he asked and more about how he asked the question.  Bunny took immediate offense to his question and burst into tears. Oh, brother! But, as much as Bunny has no problem expressing some emotions, others are locked deep inside her. Bunny has Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), and as I’ve written before, RAD is a disorder of relationships.  At some point during Bunny’s development, a trauma occurred.  Her particular trauma came from… [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]

As an adoptive mother, I have always walked a fine line when discussing my daughter's birthmothers.  Both girls were given up for adoption at birth, by teenage mothers.  Elle was a first child, and Bunny has a sister that is two years older. Coming from Russia and Guatemala, it is a fair assumption that poverty was the main reason both girls were given up for adoption. As the girl's forever mom, I have tried to be ready to answer any questions the girls might have regarding their births and adoptions.  I hold nothing but gratitude to both women, because it was their ultimate sacrifice that provided me with children.  I never fail to recognize them on 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]

As I sit at my desk, composing this post, Bunny is throwing a temper tantrum.  She doesn’t throw “normal” temper tantrums; these are oppositional defiance disorder related tantrums.  We’ve had Bunny in therapy for about six months.  At first, we thought she was just having behavioral issues because she has a sibling with reactive attachment disorder (RAD), but her behaviors are different than Elle’s and they are escalating. We have been working on a diagnosis for Bunny with our therapist.  The first assessment we took reported that she did not have RAD; she didn’t even score on the chart.  After discussing this with our therapist, we decided if we were to take the assessment again, Bunny would score off the chart… [more]

I always take a little time at the end of a year to reflect on the past year and to ponder the possibilities of the year to come.  For my family, this has been the year of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). RAD rules our house.  It factors into every fiber of our lives.  If it isn’t front and center of every day, it is always lurking in the shadows.  At the beginning of 2010, Elle’s RAD was gaining momentum, and I began to despair it would win.  But with the help of our therapist, a lot of hard work on my part, my husband and Elle’s, we started to turn the tide. We also attended a camp for families with RAD children.  The… [more]

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 child, talk about the blue baby syndrome. Talk about abandonment. Talk about fear, and hunger, and loneliness. Many domestically adopted children or foster children have plenty in their histories to be angry or sad about. Just start empathizing, but do it without turning the scene into… [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” in the purest sense of the word—kids who “melt down” because they don’t get their way. In families that tend to produce children who behave in that fashion, it is true that a very small amount of “drama” can often produce significant results for the little actor or actress. Most… [more]