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 might these “sudden” issues appear? Deborah Gray, author of Attaching in Adoption, has a wonderful chapter in her book that describes developmental ages and stages of children. She superimposes normal development onto how a child might appear if he or she were moved from placement to placement at that stage.


She describes Stage IV as “Masters of the Universe”. Normal children enter this phase at 2 ½ to 3 years of age and leave it a year or a year and a half later. It is during this stage that normally developing, attached children believe that when people meet them, they will probably like them, since they like themselves and they get the feeling that their family likes them as well. They begin to develop trust in others and confidence in their own ability to manage the world. Children with poor or insecure attachments are much less comfortable with themselves and their families, and therefore believe most folks won’t like them or be very dependable.


It is during this phase that children begin to take “who they are” and move into more social environments. They are no longer constantly in mom’s presence or in as structured an environment as they were previously. It is also the age and stage of beginning conscience development.


Therefore, families who bring home a young child and who learn very quickly that this child needs tight structure can manage negative behaviors better when that child is younger and experiencing “younger” activities. As these kids mature physically, their emotional and developmental immaturity becomes harder to mask. Their lack of confidence in their own abilities, their lack of trust in other adults and even peers, and their social ineptitude as they attempt to read cues that their healthy peers get but our developmentally stymied kids don’t get—well, it hits the fan, doesn’t it?


These issues were present all along, but due to structure, lower expectations (and less emotional/social demands on younger kids), and parental reluctance or resistance to “seeing the writing on the wall”… it is often overlooked or not addressed until it becomes so "in your face" it can't be ignored. In defense of parents, it can be hard for parents who have not raised healthy children to really grasp the degree of damage in their emotionally disturbed children; and it is only human nature to not want to admit your child has serious issues. But it is critical that those issues are acknowledged and addressed, for each day spent with a fractured foundation adds to the overall instability of the house.


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