Living the theory

We’re having sibling issues at the moment. Or more specifically, Little is having sibling issues. We’ve had a massive increase in CPV and violence towards Tiny from her in the last couple of weeks and we’re at a loss as to how to stop it. It’s always triggered by the same thing - Tiny getting something she sees as unfair. Saturday’s outburst was triggered by him having a play date (she has play dates all the time, this was his second ever!). Sunday’s was triggered by him using my computer (they’re allowed an hour each for games at the weekend and she’d already had her turn). She was intent on hurting us and him, constantly running off looking for new missiles to throw at us then running back with a grin on her face. She ripped up and knocked over things he had made and would not let up shoving her face in his and intimidating him. It culminated with me and him locked in the bathroom while she tried to bash the door down with his toy guitar, and then, when she’d eventually run ...

This week is LGBT adoption and fostering week. I am an adopter. I am also LGBT. If you read my blog regularly, you’ve  probably worked out that I’m parenting as part of a female same-sex couple. It’s not something I’ve explicitly written about in any level of detail though. Not because I’m particularly trying to hide it, but more because I feel that as a parent, the adopter part of my identity is much more significant than the LGBT part, in the sense that if I were to separate the two, I can usually find a lot more common ground with other adopters (be they gay, straight, single, coupled) than I can with lesbian parents who have chosen other ways to build a family. Would I have become an adopter if I weren’t LGBT? I can’t honestly answer that, because I don’t know. I’ve never tried to have a birth child or felt a need to try so I don’t know if it would have been an option for me under different circumstances. My wife and I knew early on in our relationship that we wanted childr...

Little has spent the best part of a week ignoring me. She’s in constant need of full control, and splitting is one of the mechanisms she uses to achieve that. I’ve written recently about the tailspin she seems to be caught up in and one of the possible triggers we’ve uncovered, and things are continuing much in that vein, with no discernible change now that our trip abroad is behind us. I find her splitting one of the hardest behaviours to manage, as it also presses the big red button for one of my triggers: rejection. As a child I often didn’t ask for things as to me, being told ‘no’ felt worse than just going without in the first place. As an adult, it took me an episode of depression to be able to learn that it was ok to ask for things, and to request help when I needed it, rather than taking everything on myself. It’s still something I have to consciously think about though, so Little’s rejection of me stings. Several times recently I’ve noticed she looks a little wobbly an...

We’ve recently braved travelling abroad with the children for the first time. Staying away from home is a challenge for us all, and is an area where we’ve been gradually building up their tolerance over the past year or so. We started off with one night away at my parents’ house and have very gradually increased the number of nights. We’re up to three nights now, so the time felt right to attempt a trip to see their other set of grandparents, who live abroad. The trip involved a number of firsts… namely their first trip abroad, and their first time on a plane, and we’d done a lot of thinking about possible triggers and had planned accordingly. We paid a bit extra to secure a sensibly timed flight from a small airport not too far away and created a plan together of how we’d get there, what the flight would be like, some of the things we’d do while away, and how we’d get back. We made both of the children visual planners to track how long we’d be away and how close we were to going h...

Tiny really hates brushing his teeth. He has a number of sensory aversions, and we think this is one of them. His reactions have ranged from refusal, ignoring, throwing the toothbrush across the room and brushing everything but his teeth with it, to his current instinct to gag every time the toothbrush comes close to his mouth. Today he gagged to the point of actually being sick. Only a little bit, but still… he really hates cleaning his teeth. We’ve tried so many different things. Manual toothbrushes and electric toothbrushes. Minty toothpaste, fruity toothpaste, no toothpaste. Doing it for him and encouraging him to do it himself. Acknowledging his aversion to it and doing it together. Leaving him to it. The promise of rewards, or warnings of no sweets. Nothing has worked for more than a few weeks at a time, if that. I found myself researching alternative methods of teeth cleaning on the way into work today (someone must have invented something you just swill round your ...

Little does not want to do her reading practice. It's boring, apparently. She flounces up the stairs, flinging her reading book around. By the time I get to her room she's hiding under the duvet. I sit down on the bed and attempt to empathise with how horrible it must be to have to do something so boring, and promise some fun afterwards. She kicks me. I ask her to stop; she doesn't. I retreat to my bedroom, and let her know where to find me when she's ready. She follows me to the bedroom. I attempt to use humour to snap her out of it and point out she's got some cheese from dinner stuck to her cardigan. I pick it off and feed it to the cat, who's asleep on the bed. She hits the cat. I ask her not to. She hits the cat again. I pick the cat up and call my wife to come and remove her.* While we're waiting for her to come upstairs, Little continues to hit my legs and pull the cat's tail. Once the cat is out of the equation I offer Little a hug. She declin...

We went to watch Little’s school Christmas show today. It’s the second Christmas show we’ve seen her in, and as we watched her bouncing around, bright-eyed, over-enthusiastically joining in with all the singing and dancing, we couldn’t help but cast our minds back to this time last year. At the time of her last Christmas show Little had been living with us for around 6 weeks. She’d barely been at her new school a couple of weeks. She’s always been Christmas mad and had made a good effort at learning the songs and joining in, but she was still visibly shell-shocked from the huge changes that had just taken place in her life. We all were. I’m sure the show was good last year, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. I remember feeling anxious and overwhelmed. We were squished into the school hall like sardines, it was hot, Tiny was fidgeting on our laps and constantly trying to squirm away and join his sister on the stage. I didn’t feel like I knew how to be a parent and I was there watching ...

I fell foul of the health visitors this week. One of the strategies we use to help regulate and calm both of our children is a child carrier. It’s a fairly sturdy one, with padded straps and clips and it provides us with a comfortable way of keeping them close at times when they need it. They both really like being in it, and will often ask to use it if they’re feeling a bit wobbly. We also sometimes use the carrier to transport Tiny. He’s only 3, he can’t walk as far as the adults or his sister, and it’s a more connecting way of getting him around than the buggy. When he’s in the buggy he’s facing away from us, we can’t hear him well and he often completely spaces out. When he’s in the carrier we can interact with him a lot more, with obvious benefits for the attachment we’re still trying to build with him. We’re not the only ones who do this; a quick Google search will find you many other parents who believe there’s a benefit to carrying toddlers and preschoolers, both birth and ...

As far as looks go, our children are very obviously siblings. Personality-wise, however, they couldn’t be more different. I’m not sure whether these different personalities are innate, or as a result of their unique experiences in the birth family and in the womb - one, by virtue of being older, spent a lot longer in their birth family, while the younger one, due to circumstances at the time of birth mum’s pregnancy, probably had a more difficult in utero experience. Where one is a thrill-seeker, and doesn’t even seem to see danger, the other is naturally over-cautious and really struggles with high anxiety levels. Little will launch herself into a new situation without a backwards glance, and constantly wants to go faster, higher and longer. She relishes new experiences and is very happy with changes in routine. Tiny, on the other hand, hangs back in any new situation. Unpredictability leads to heightened anxiety - sometimes to the point that it makes him physically ill. He has seve...

Today we had a farewell visit with our social worker. It felt so odd, saying goodbye after her having been a consistent presence in our life for the past 21 months. Social workers often cop a lot of flak on the adoption message boards I use, and I don’t doubt that, as with any profession, there are good, bad and average ones out there. I can’t praise ours highly enough though. She’s been there for us through some pretty tough moments, has been a great advocate for us and our children, and has been exactly the right mix of professional yet human. I know some people look forward to the adoption order precisely because it means the end of  social work visits, but I would happily let ours keep coming if she could! I’ve been trying to do a mental tally of how many social workers have been involved with us over our adoption journey so far. I think I’m on seven: There was the social worker who did our initial home visit, who helped us across the first hurdle. We didn’t warm to her ins...

This is a guest post I wrote elsewhere for National Adoption week, but thought I'd reproduce it here since I haven't posted in a while. Trauma is a bit of a buzzword in the adoption community at the moment. The overwhelming majority, if not all, children who are adopted today will have experienced trauma of some kind, be it in person or in utero. The erroneous belief that a stable, loving home is all that is needed to make this go away is starting to give way to a deeper understanding of the effects of trauma, and the fact that whether  they consciously remember it or not, this trauma will have a lifelong effect in several areas of that child's life. "PTSD is a good definition for acute trauma in adults. (However when the trauma occurs in childhood) because children’s brains are still developing, trauma has a much more pervasive and long-range influence on their self-concept, on their sense of the world and on their ability to regulate themselves.” (Bessel van der ...

I actually had another topic planned for my next post, but we’ve been having so much push/pull behaviour from Tiny lately that I felt like I needed to write about it. This is something he does at times – it’s usually much worse and much more noticeable at times when he feels unsettled, and we’re still trying to work out which of several possible triggers is behind the latest increase. It usually starts with something fairly minor that for some reason he takes offence to. This morning it was the stairgate. Most times when he gets up in the morning the stairgate is closed. This morning Little was already awake and watching TV downstairs, so it was open. Cue lying on the floor screaming for it to be closed. From then on we can do nothing right. If we close the gate, he screams for it to be open again. If one parent goes to him he screams for the other. If we try to stay with him he screams at us to go away, with a little bit of kicking to make his message clear if needed. If we leave, h...

This week's #WASO theme invites us to write about challenges, positives or something that's worked really well for your family. It's a good one, as it's pushed me into writing a post that I've been wanting to write for a long time, but which I've been putting off because it's a big one and needs quite a bit of time and mental engery. I've referenced some training we attended recently in a couple of previous posts and haven't said much more than that. I wasn't meaning to be cryptic, I just didn't have the time at that moment to write too much about the specifics. And because it's something quite different to anything I've done before, I didn't want to mention it without being able to do it justice. So here it is... The Great Behaviour Breakdown, which is the cornerstone of pretty much everything we're trying to put in place at home at the moment. Rewind nine months. Little and Tiny had just moved in. We had the typical 'h...

I am ten pages in to Dan Hughes's book Building the Bonds of Attachment  and I can already tell that it's going to be a very useful read. It's not the first time I've come across his description of 'developemental trauma', but as with so many things, re-reading it with fresh eyes (or rather pretty tired and jaded eyes!) now that we've had the best part of a year to get to know our children brought home to me how much it currently applies to one of the little people in our care; so much so that I made my partner stop what she was doing and listen while I read it aloud. I've read a few things lately - in other blog posts or on various Facebook groups I follow - about attachment and how attachment difficulties are often (mis)used as a catch-all term to explain away any and all problems adopted children face, when in fact attachment problems are a symptom of the wider difficulty of developmental trauma rather than being a cause in their own right. I coul...

We've been trying to implement something called  the affection prescription  with the children in the last few months. It's much easier said than done, and we're currently taking it in the spirit of the idea rather than follow it to the letter. The basic principle is about ensuring that you are spending quality, child-led time with each of your children individually. The prescription is for 10 minutes first thing, 20 minutes in the afternoon and 10 minutes in the evening, which doesn't sound like much on paper, but the practicalities of daily life mean that it's very much a work in progress here... the main problem being that the ratio is often one adult to both children, and quality time usually means something different to each of them, so unless we're both around, it can be a challenge. One thing we have consistently implemented, however, is 10 minutes of quality, child-led time for each of them at the very beginning of their bedtime routines. We alternate ch...

In my last post I wrote about the drama triangle and the way it can play out during conflict in our household. I'm pleased to say that things have generally been feeling a bit calmer over the last couple of weeks (touch wood!) which I think we've all needed. This has also given me some space to give a bit of thought to another role of the drama triangle in our interactions. All children display big emotions from time to time. I remember reading something in the past about the reason that the 'oh, all children do that' comment in relation to adopted children and behavioural challenges wasn't helpful was because it failed to take into account the intensity and frequency of the behaviour or emotions, which is often much greater. Certainly from my point of view, it also leads to me feeling that my concerns are being dismissed and that I'm not being listened to or supported in how I feel. This is also how our children can end up feeling if we fail to listen to and ac...

The drama triangle is not a new concept to me. It's one I'm familiar with from my training days and in my professional life. As professionals we are taught how easy it is to enter into the rescuer role, and to see the people we are working with (who are often vulnerable in one way or another) as victims. The difficulty with this is that we are then instantly doing things to or for them, rather than with them, and are not empowering them to do things for themselves, which inhibits their ability to make lasting changes in their situations. In a recent training I attended (more on that in another post), the drama triangle was applied to adoption, and specifically to supporting a child who exhibits challenging behaviour.  I won't go into the detail of the theory, as there's plenty of easily accessible information out there about it, but in short, it represents a model of unhelpful communication within relationships or situations, where people fall, or are drawn, into one of...

We have two little people (Little, aged 6 and Tiny, aged 3), who were placed for adoption with us in the latter part of 2016. Like every other prospective adopters, we'd read a lot about theories, difficulties and various approaches beforehand, but without any specific children to link it to, I quickly reached information saturation. Then the little people arrived, and as we'd been warned, nothing quite prepares you for the reality! Probably the truest piece of advice I was given prior to their arrival was from a (birth) parent colleague of mine, who said 'nothing can prepare you. You can't realise how much your life will change until it does!' She was so right. In my professional life, I work in the health and social care sector, where pretty much everything we do is based on tried and tested evidence based approaches. In my work I'm frequently required to reflect on why I'm doing things a certain way, and I've found that one of the ways to keep myself ...