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[From Canada] What’s All the Fuss about Complex Trauma?
Is difficult to find helpful professionals who are “trauma informed.” This core idea, that a child’s brain and nervous system (and thus all development) is profoundly affected by trauma, is a game-changer. Read more…
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[link] What Kids with Trauma Need in School
I read this today and thought it was spot on. … You may also not understand why my child is absent so often. You may think I just need to do something a little more forceful to get him out of bed and on the bus. You may think that he is just being lazy or defiant and needs me to be firm, set stronger limits, or implement some consequences for his inability to be normal and just come to school. You think this will solve the problem. Just punish him, and he will learn to behave. Sometimes I privately laugh at…
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Link: Please don’t say “all kids do that” to adoptive and foster families…
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…
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The Power of Yes
I’ve done several mindfulness exercises with our oldest son in pursuit of self awareness and emotional regulation.He’s got a background of early childhood trauma, and often finds regulating himself to be very difficult. They’ve been so beneficial, he’s even asked to do them on occasion One Saturday when he was 8 I discussed with him doing an experiment from Parenting from the Inside Out by Dan Siegel. First we sat and closed our eyes and breathed slowly and discussed how our bodies felt. Then I asked him to keep paying attention to how his body felt while I said a…
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It is Enough!
We’ve kicked our family prayer life up a notch this church year. Since Advent, we’ve been engaging more with the Book of Common Prayer. Tonight January 2’s Old Testament Reading from the Book of Common Prayer is from 1 Kings 19:1-8. Elijah just confronted evil king Ahab,had a dramatic and daring day-long confrontation with hundreds of false prophets of idols, and saw God send fire from heaven for the win. Then God answered his repeated prayers and send rain to end the drought. But that was last chapter. Now, instead of a revival; instead of commendation, he gets guarantees of…
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Something Smells Terrible
If this chapter of our lives had a title, it would be: Something Smells Terrible. I mentioned this to my wife who added a subtitle: And Why is This Wet? I’m a dad of 5 kids – the oldest is 8, the youngest will be born later this spring. I’m an adoptive dad. I’m a biological dad. I’m a dad of a multiracial family. I’m a dad of a kid who continues to experience the consequences of early childhood trauma. I’m a dad who doesn’t know what he’s doing. We dads need to be able to talk about this. There’s…