Stealing

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]

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 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]

Answers.com defines stealing as follows: to take (the property of others) without right or permission. It does not define certain circumstances where it is acceptable to steal or not ... it says taking property without right or permission. In a recent comment, Mater had this to say: As for stealing, here I disagree with Nancy Spoolstra that stealing is stealing. Without intending in the least to pry, I do believe it matters what children take and what are the circumstances, such as the child's age/understanding and cultural background. For an extreme example, throughout history, the man who steals bread for his starving children has been considered less immoral than the man who robs a widow of her savings. Likewise with children, for example, it matters greatly 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 and after I tape up the electrical wires and tie down some buckets, he will start living in the round pen and eating… [more]