I saw this being shared online and resisted reading it for a while. There’s so much information being written from so many different, conflicting, perspectives.
This is from a site called Church4EveryChild, a blog I’m not familiar with, so don’t read this as an endorsement… unless you find that everything there is amazing.
I’m so glad I read it today.
I get the temptation to say “all kids do that.” Truly, I do. But when foster or adoptive parents like me hear that, it feels dismissive to the real grief, pain, and trauma our kids have experienced and how that history still influences their actions today. Usually when someone tells another parent “all kids do that,” the words are meant to be helpful, to soothe our nerves or encourage us in the midst of a hard parenting moment. But that’s not what your words do. Instead those words invalidate what we know to be true and minimize the extra layer of thinking that parenting kids from hard places requires.