My wife and I have recently moved back to Maine after living in North Carolina for a couple of years, and I’ve been trying to catch up on things. Sorry for the delay in adding new stuff to the blog.
–ken
Hi Ken,
Our adopted daughter has RAD. She has been with us for 2 years. We finally have an in-home therapist who understands her condition. However, she suggested doing something fun to throw her off guard. Any suggestions? Right now, she is confused by our calmness.
Thanks,
Tammy
Tammy, it sounds like you have a very good therapist since that’s an excellent suggestion. If you look at the left sidebar of this blog, near the top you’ll see a section called “Random Quotes” or something like that. Everytime you refresh your browser, it will display another quote – although most of them are not so much quotes as they are suggestions of things that a parent might try with their child, some of which I stole from my next suggestion, which is a book called “99 Ways to Drive Your Child Sane” by Brita St. Clair. It is a small, easy-to-read, but excellent book that is packed with good ideas that you can have fun with, and still be effective. That would be my strongest suggestion.
While it is difficult to sustain sometimes, the most effective thing that I found was to remain calm. Because the disorder in your child wants the opposite of calmness on your part, it’s never good to feed the disorder, although I think you can forgive yourself if you do once in awhile.
– ken
I thought I’d let you know that I haven’t abandoned the blog. I have been working some long hours and haven’t had a chance to add to it lately, but will make a point of doing so within the next few days, and probably tomorrow.
I have a couple of emails that I could get to, and a book that I’ve read but haven’t reviewed yet – An Unlit Path, by Deborah L. Hannah, another that I was in the process of reading until I mislaid it somewhere, and Dan Hughes’ new book which just arrived today – Attachment-Focused Parenting.
– ken
I’ve been reading through your site and I think that my grandson might have an attachment disorder. We took him in a few years ago. He was not quite two years old then. I’m afraid he didn’t have an easy time of it his first years, since our daughter never married, wasn’t home much and wasn’t really much of a mother. I hate to say it but there were a lot of problems that I won’t go into.
Right off, we noticed that our grandson seemed so very independent for someone so young, almost like he hardly needed anyone. He didn’t cry but neither did he seem happy. But he wasn’t a problem either. Most two year olds are a bigger problem than he was, I think.
He’s seven now, and a lot has changed. He steals from us all the time. Fact is, he doesn’t seem even to be taking things that he wants. Stuff just disappears, and there’s no one else around who could be taking it. Some of it, we were able to find in his room but we have been finding things in the trash. He steals things just to throw them in the trash. A lot of it we never find again.
In five years, he has seldom wanted to be held or to sit next to anyone, and the only interaction he is interested in seems to be intended only to annoy. He talks but he doesn’t say anything, if you know what I mean. He asks questions, then walks away while I’m answering. When his grandmother, who has been his mother for most of his life, asks him for a hug, he stands stiff with his arms to his side.
I see a lot of him in what I have been reading on your web site. He hasn’t been violent though, nor has he shown much in the way of a temper. He has gotten angry but no more so than most kids. More than that, he just seems indifferent. He is perfectly okay lying on his bed doing nothing. Then he is up at night doing God knows what, since that is when things tend to disappear.
From your site, I think there’s a chance that he has an attachment disorder. The problem is that we live in Mississippi and I haven’t been able to find an attachment therapist. I looked in your list of therapists and don’t see anything for MIssissippi. I looked a couple of other places too, but don’t see anyone near us.
Do you have any suggestions?
Donald Whitman
Donald, I’ve already answered your email but if you should come across this here, you’ll notice that I’ve changed your name. For that sake of privacy, that’s a policy I’ve been using here.
The characteristics that you’ve described, as well as the background story, certainly sounds as if your grandson could be suffering from reactive attachment disorder. That’s not necessarily the case, however. You’ll need to get a diagnosis so that you can know just what you’re dealing with.
Unfortunately, Mississippi is one of only three states for which I haven’t been able to find an attachment therapist. The RadKid.Org Directory of Reactive Attachment Disorder Resources has nearly seven hundred listings, but none from Delaware, Mississippi or Wyoming.
That said, I can’t believe that there are no attachment therapists in the entire state of Mississippi. Mostly, my directory is a directory of web sites, and a lot of attachment therapists don’t have web sites. If I knew of an attachment therapist, I would add a listing for him or her in the RadKid.Org Attachment Therapist Directory, or invite them to add their own listing is our wiki-style AT directory, and then add the URL to that listing to the regular directory, the important thing being to help people like you find an attachment therapist when they need one.
If anyone reading this knows of an attachment therapist in Delaware, Mississippi or Wyoming, please let me know about it, or invite them to add their contact information to the RadKid.Org Attachment Therapist Directory, or get in touch with me if they’d like a regular web site.
Meanwhile, you need help. Given that we don’t know for a fact that your grandson suffers from reactive attachment disorder, and don’t yet know where to turn to if that proves to be the case, my suggestion is that you seek help from a qualified mental health professional. If I fear that I may be suffering from a heart problem, it wouldn’t be insensible for me to seek a diagnosis before I go looking for a heart specialist; unless of course, I knew of a good heart specialist nearby.
Since we don’t, it might be a good idea to get in touch with a mental health facility. Have your grandson diagnosed, and if the diagnosis is reactive attachment disorder, there is a chance that whoever makes the diagnosis will have a suggestion for you as to where to go from there. That’s not a perfect solution, since some mental health professionals are hesitant to diagnose patients with reactive attachment disorder, or provide attachment therapy.
Since children with reactive attachment disorder often suffer from a number of other problems as well, sometimes they will want to treat for associated problems rather than for the attachment disorder, usually without success.
If the diagnosis is reactive attachment disorder, both you and your wife should be a part of his therapy. If a therapist wants to see your grandson alone for therapy, that’s not attachment therapy.
Alternatively, you might want to contact an adoption support agency in Mississippi, if you know of one, or can find one. When I search on the phrase “Mississippi adoption support” in Google, several results come up. I don’t know whether any of them will pan out, but reactive attachment disorder is seen in adoption situations perhaps even more often than in kin-care situations, so an adoption support agency might be able to refer you to an attachment therapist.
Also, the support forum that I organized a few years back on Delphiforums.com may prove to be a resource for you. It’s free, and there’s always a chance that someone there might be able to refer you to someone. If nothing else, it’s an excellent source of information and support.
Please check back here every now and then, as someone may come around who knows of an attachment therapist in Mississippi. I’ll also try to remember to send it on to you, if that should occur.
Good luck, and may God bless!
– ken
Hello, I am a school social worker in a very tiny district in upstate New York. We have an 8th grader with reactive attachment disorder and I have been working closely with the pediatrician for her. She is currently living with her biological father and his wife, and they are at the end for what they are able to do for this young lady. I would like to speak with you about any and all suggestions you may have. Could you possibly send me a contact number? It would be greatly appreciated.
Gordon Heard, LCSW
Hello Gordon, thanks for writing. As you can see, I have changed your name for the purpose of this blog. If you still believe that it might be helpful, I’ll give you my telephone number but I’d much rather refer you to someone who could be of more help, as I am not a mental health professional.
Having parented an eighth grader with reactive attachment disorder though, I do have a few ideas or suggestions. First, I can fully understand and appreciate the troubles they are having with this young girl. Please correct me if I am wrong but I think that I can assume that she is not being seen by an attachment therapist. Unfortunately, I don’t know that things are likely to get better without it. Traditional therapy might be of some help with the behavioral problems but more often than not, it does more harm than good, since children with reactive attachment disorder are motivated differently than children with other behavioral problems.
My strongest suggestion for the parents is that they seek help from a trained attachment therapist. There is a list of attachment centers and therapists in New York, which can be found in that section of the RadKid.Org Directory of Reactive Attachment Resources. While there may not be anyone within the town that these folks live in, it is not at all unusual for parents to have to make a longer drive once a week for this important therapy. Our nephew’s attachment therapist was an hour and a half away from us, yet the drive was well worth it.
Specifically, I would suggest calling one of the listed centers – the Center for Family Development, Hudson Valley Family Attachments or the New York Family Attachment Center; or perhaps even the Martha Welch Center for Family Treatment; since, although she is located in New York City, she is one of the pioneers of attachment therapy and may well know of someone who might be closer to you.
Additionally, you might suggest to the parents that they avail themselves of an excellent online support forum. My wife and I organized the RadKid forum on Delphiforums.com several years ago. Although, I am no longer the host of the forum, I am still involved with it and it is being managed by a group of parents more capable than myself. Not only might this be a place where they can vent, ask for advice, and receive some good ideas, but someone there might even know of a more local resource for you. There is no charge to participate in the forum, thought Delphiforums.com does offer a paid membership program which removes the advertisements.
If you still believe that you need to speak to me, please let me know and I’ll send you my telephone number.
– ken
Hello,
I’m an adoptive mother to a child with attachment disorders and I’ve happened upon your site while searching the web. I found it very informative and encouraging and would like to join your forum. However, each link I clicked to go there came up with an error. Could you send me a direct link through email and I can see if I have any better luck?
Much appreciated!
Jamie
Jamie, unless Delphiforums.com was having a problem the day you tried it, I’m not sure what the problem might have been. As far as I know, it’s been up on a pretty steady basis for the past several years. If you are referring to a link to the forum from the RadKid.Org site, please let me know which ones didn’t work so that I can make sure that I have them set up properly.
Although my wife and I established the RadKid forum on Delphiforums.com, I am no longer the host of it. During a period of upheaval at my house, I was absent from the forum for quite some time, in which time its hosting was given to my co-host, who is certainly a capable person. I have since returned to the forum and still serve as a co-host there, but it’s not really “my” forum anymore. In reality, it’s better now because the responsibility for it is spread out between a number of amazing people, mostly experienced mothers of children with reactive attachment disorder.
Meanwhile, this link should work for you.
– ken
Thank you so much for this site. My husband and I have adopted four children. One of our daughters was 2 1/2 when she came home, and is now 4 1/2. In the last couple of months, she has been displaying some pretty severe signs of reactive attachment disorder.
I work in residential treatment, and so I am somewhat aware of RAD and what this means for my child and family. I am, however, in the beginning stages of getting really educated and found out that, through the state we are in, we qualify for home therapy which will start next week, and we are very excited.
Anyway, I was looking around your site, and saw that there is an online course available. Course #2522 Attachment Disorders: Understanding & Behavior Management Strategies. Instructor: Dr. Catherine Swanson Cain. I was wondering if you could send me information on how to take this course.
Thank you for all that you do.
Maria Saines TRS/CTRS
Unfortunately, it appears that this course is no longer being offered through Universal Class. I will try to remember to make that change on my site the next time I update it.
That’s too bad, because it was an excellent course. Catherine Swanson Cain is the author of a book on the subject of reactive attachment disorder, by the way. The book is entitled, Attachment Disorders: Treatment Strategies for Traumatized Children.
You are fortunate to live in a state where help is available. This is not the case for far too many parents in this country.
Although I have replied to your email separately, if you come across it here, you will notice that I’ve changed your name. I will do so whenever I publish letters received by RadKid.Org.
– ken
I’ve just finished reviewing an English novel by the name of Waiting for the Other Shoe. In her first novel, Maggie Handsley weaves a story around a young child with undiagnosed reactive attachment disorder, the result being a wonderfully constructed story of the people who tried to love this girl, and the devastation she caused. It’s not so much a story about reactive attachment disorder as it is one of the people involved. I was very much impressed with it, as you can see from my review of it for the RadKid.Org site.
– ken
I recently finished reading a new book on reactive attachment disorder. Written by Lori Oden and Anita Diener, who met through their adoption of biological sisters, both of whom suffered from reactive attachment disorder. The book is an honest story of their experiences while raising these children. Within the book, you will also hear from the kids, and even the biological mother.
The name of the book is Our Journey to Forever… Had Potholes Along the Way. It’s a good book, and an interesting read. I won’t do a full review of the book here because I’ve just published my review of it for the review pages of the RadKid.Org site.
– ken
Hello,
My 15 year-old son was just diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder. I have been doing a lot of reading, and I am lucky I stumbled on this web site, it has been a real big help. RAD kids are so tough.
Anyway my question to you is do you know any books for RAD teens? I’ve read the Nancy Thomas books and others. But, her suggestions are not going to work with my teen. What do you do when you look at the teen with love, give them a command and a hug, and they say, “fuck you, bitch”, instead of “yes, mom”, and walk away. Then what? Any books for teens with RAD you can recommend? I don’t want books for teens without the RAD, I’ve been reading them also, and they too are no help. If you know any please email me back.
All, in all, since finding this site, and reading the books Joshua has been doing a lot better, we’ve had great days, and good days instead of days from hell. Neurofeedback and Attachment Institute are beginning for us. But I need more help. Thanks a lot.
Sarah
Sarah, thanks for writing. I understand your dilemma, as we had the same problem. Our nephew came to us on his twelfth birthday, and was nearly thirteen before he was diagnosed. Once we got a diagnosis, we read dozens of books on reactive attachment disorder, and found that nearly everything published was written with an assumption that the child was an infant or very young child. Although there are certainly enough references to older children in most of them, and I know that most, if not all, of the authors dealt with kids who were older as well, most of what I read seemed to be appropriate only for very young children.
But then, as I read books about the disorder itself, and not only the ones intended to tell me what to do about it, I learned something that opened my eyes. I began to realize that the part of my nephew that I needed to reach in order to facilitate his recovery was indeed very young. Emotionally, he was barely a toddler.
To be honest, I wish that some of the books were clearer about this, but you can’t reach a teenager at the level of a teenager until that child has first learned to be a toddler. I don’t know about your son but my nephew knew only two emotions: happy and angry, and he really only understood the latter. When he wasn’t angry, he considered himself to be happy. He truly did not understand more subtle emotions, and seemed able to recognize them in others only as they could serve as a tool for manipulation.
We bought wall charts that were illustrations of people’s faces, depicting various emotions, labeling them and giving circumstances in which a person might experience these emotions. We didn’t make a big deal out of this chart but put it up on the wall just outside of his bedroom, and would at times ask him to correctly identify a number of emotions before he could do something, or go somewhere.
He studied this chart on his own, no doubt realizing that he might be able to use some of this stuff. On our part, we felt that if he couldn’t feel these emotions, if he could learn to fake them well enough, he would at least have a leg up on living in society. There are also emotions games that can be found, intended to help people to understand emotions.
We also learned that, while he appeared to have a very well developed vocabulary, and could use sophisticated language correctly in a sentence, he didn’t know what the words meant. He learned them by imitation rather than by understanding, but that was better than not knowing them at all.
We bought several books intended for very young children, such as “The Velveteen Rabbit”, “I Feel Happy and Sad and Angry and Glad”, and others that you can find in my section on books for younger children with reactive attachment disorder. We ordered several of these books, but if we were to simply give them to him with the idea that we wanted him to read them, he would be insulted, and would probably refuse to read them. His reading abilities were very good, and to ask him to read a book intended for a five year-old would be an affront.
Instead – and this was a trick that I was to use often – we left the books sitting in our library, which he had access to. He picked them up on his own and read them. I found some of them in his room, and saw him paging through them on more than one ocassion. There is a reason why very young children read books for very young children, and he still needed to get what there was to be gotten from them. He had permission to read anything in our library, after I had removed all of the books about serial killers and such.
I did other things with him, such as making a game of carrying him around on my shoulders or walking him around the house while he stood on my feet, that were things that fathers generally do with children of a much younger age. He loved it and I believe, not only that there is a reason that fathers do these things with their very young children, but that he still needed this.
He didn’t get that from his father when he was a very young child, as his father was in the process of dying from AIDS at the time that he was born. While he lived for a few years into my nephew’s life, he wasn’t in a condition to do many of the things that fathers generally do; and my nephew didn’t get to be the focus of his family as newborn children generally are. He still needed this stuff.
About a year after he came to live with us, I began reading to him at night. I wasn’t sure how to approach this, knowing that he could read quite well for himself, and that he did read quite a lot on his own, but I figured that this was probably something that no one had ever done with him when he was younger. As it was, he gave me the opening. I was reading “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card. It is a series, and I had just started the first part of the series when he asked if he could read it when I was done with it. Instead, I offered to start over from the beginning and to read a chapter or two before he went to sleep every night, so that we could both read it together.
This turned into the best time that we were to spend together. It led to some of the rare real conversations that we were to have, and I think that it helped for him to be able to go to sleep without the negatives.
Later, I refined that practice to turn it into something that he couldn’t sabotage. No matter how awful his behavior during the day, I would still read to him before he went to sleep. Even when he had threatened to kill me, and struck me in the face one afternoon, while we were waiting for the respite provider to pick him up, I offered to read to him before he left since he wouldn’t be at our home that night. Despite the fact that he was still very angry, he eagerly agreed. He got into bed, and I sat with him and read a chapter from one of Orson Scott Card’s books. He left us that day no longer angry, and with the tension greatly reduced.
Another rule that I developed for reading time was that it couldn’t be used to manipulate, so that he couldn’t use these moments of closeness to manipulate, or to get out of a consequence such as going to respite.
It wasn’t until he was fifteen that I began to sense that the reading time was no longer necessary, although there were still times when he wanted it. I don’t believe that it became less necessary because he had become older; rather, I believe that its usefulness had declined because he had progressed beyond that point, emotionally.
At the same time, he was a teenager. In other ways, he needed to be treated like a teenager. He wasn’t retarded in any way, intellectually. In fact, he was – and is – very bright, and capable of holding his own intellectually, even with adults. In some ways, this was both a curse and a blessing, but that’s another matter.
When we were doing things that might be thought more appropriate for much younger kids, I made more of a private joke out it, and I didn’t do these things when anyone outside of the family was around. More importantly, I didn’t treat it like therapy. But I knew that he needed it, and it appeared that he knew that he needed it. Although he was ahead of many other kids his age intellectually, emotionally he was far behind, and he could no more be expected to appreciate the more sophisticated aspects of relationships until he had completed the basics than we could expect someone to excel in algebra until he had first learned basic mathematics.
Your son is fifteen, and he is an individual, so not everything that might have worked for me will work for you, but don’t be afraid to try things that appear to be more appropriate for much younger children. It might require some finesse on your part to find a way in which to introduce these things that isn’t insulting to him.
I wish that there were more books available specifically for dealing with older kids, and perhaps someone reading this will know of some that I’m not aware of, and suggest them to you here as a comment. Although I have read many of them, and continue to read, I haven’t read even everything that I have listed in the book section of my site.
I did, however, learn that much of the Nancy Thomas stuff that, at first glance, appeared to be for much younger kids, was in fact still applicable to my teenager. One small book that is packed with good ideas for kids of any age is “99 Ways to Drive Your Child Sane,” by Brita St. Clair. This is sort of a fun book, but one that offers practical ideas for attachment parenting, ones that you can easily build upon with a little bit of thought.
Other than that, I can’t think of one book that is expressly designed with older children in mind. Nearly every book that I have read about reactive attachment disorder has been helpful to me in some way, but the ones that I gained the most from were those that helped me to understand the disorder, and to more closely understand that thought processes that have led up to the actions that I would like to change. Given a better understanding of the problem, I was in a better position to react appropriately, rather than in anger.
In this, I found Dr. Dan Hughes’ books to be the most helpful, and am looking forward to reading his new one when it comes out. You might want to use your attachment therapist as a resource, as well. He – or she – might be able to recommend something that I can’t think of right now. If so, please check back with us to let us know.
– ken