RadKid.Org Blog

Ken, 

Thank you for this site and especially your personal notes about raising your rad-kid. We just came back from the psychologist, who seemed very good, professional, supportive and informational; and he thinks our adopted son, Daren, is a rad-kid. We, my wife and I, do too… I just staggered a bit to have the present and future so clearly articulated. Please just send me a little note saying you recieved this. I feel pretty isolated at this time. Thanks; and best wishes and thoughts to you for being a sharing person. I’m deeply grateful that I might be in even a little bit of contact with someone else who understands.

Tom

Tom, I just came across your email amongst my older correspondence. I hope that I replied to you at the time that your email was received. I think I did and if not, I apologize deeply. There have been some periods in my life where I just couldn’t possibly keep up with everything that I had to do, let alone those things that I wanted to do.

Hopefully, your son’s psychologist is trained in the treatment of reactive attachment disorder, as not every mental health professional is. Some of them seem to have ripped that page out of their copy of the DSM, while others can diagnose it but not treat it. Traditional therapy doesn’t work well with children suffering from reactive attachment disorder.

I know exactly how you feel when you say that you feel isolated. Everyone who has ever parented a child with reactive attachment disorder has felt that, since a common characteristic of the disorder is the the willingness and ability that these kids have to alienate their parents from everyone who might otherwise serve as a support system, including neighbors, other family members, people in church, teachers, etc.

There is an online forum hosted on Delphiforums.com that my wife and I started several years ago. Although I am not as heavily involved with it, and am no longer the host, I am still a moderator there, and I log in pretty much every day. Regardless, the forum is in able hands, and I think you’ll find it helpful to be able to discuss things with people who have gone through it. The forum is Delphiforums: Reactive Attachment Disorder. Give it a try, and I think you’ll be glad you did.

– ken

Hey, I’m a nursing student from North Carolina. I am writing a paper on Reactive Attachment Disorder for my class and I was wondering if you could send me some information on the who, what, when, where, and why of Reactive Attachment Disorder. Information about the treatment and what it is and who might be more likely to be diagnosed with it, basically just any information that you would like to share with me about the disorder. Thank You.

- Jennifer Gordan,  Student Nurse

Jennifer, I could do that. However, it would take me some time to put it together for you and, since I’ve already done that in my RadKid.Org site, this is time that could be better spent elsewhere. I would refer you to my site, to others in the Informational section of the RadKid.Org Directory, and perhaps some that you can find on the front page of the directory, such as the site for ATTACh.

I’m not through building up the Informational section, but you’ll find some useful stuff there.

Since you’re looking for information for a paper that you’re researching, you might even want to look at the opinions of the detractors of attachment therapy. Much of it consists of the rantings of people who could have probably benefited from attachment therapy themselves but perhaps there is something there to give you another perspective. I’ve listed a few of those sites in the Critical section of the directory.

Of course, if someone else wants to break it down for you in comments, they are more than welcome to do so.

– ken

Hi,

My son, who is adopted, has been diagnosed with RAD. We have a great therapist for him, finally; though We have only seen her once, already she has been a great help. She gave us a lot to read, but that is ok.

My question is – and what I need help with is… He is 5 years old. He’s been with us for 2 years now. He has been stealing my oldest daughters items. She is 9. And when ever he knows that something is her favorite, he steals it. He taken two computer games, two DVDs and some of her favorite stuffed animals.

We have just about torn this house apart looking for them. 

How do we get the answer from him of where they are? What do I do? Help me!

Thank you,

Terri

Terri, I wish I had a better answer but the quick answer to your question is that you can’t get an answer from him about where your daughter’s things are. If your son has reactive attachment disorder, control is pretty much the most important thing in his life and if there is one thing that he can control in his life, it is information. My nephew made an eight-foot long roof rake disappear from my house not long after I bought it, but there was never anything that I could think of that would get that information from him. I never saw that roof rake again, and everytime I brought it up I reminded him that he had the power over that bit of information.

Stealing and then lying about it are common characteristics of reactive attachment disorder. As long as he suffers from the disorder, you will witness its characteristics. You cannot control whether or not your son tells the truth, so you may as well admit to yourself that this is something that is entirely within his control and, as such, it is likely to be one of the last behaviors to go away as he begins to heal.

While there is always a chance that your daughter’s stuff will show up again, I wouldn’t count on it. Rather, I would concentrate on protecting your daughter from losing any more of her stuff. Stealing is another matter, it being something that you may be able to exert some control over.

When you park your car downtown or at the mall, you probably lock the doors, and you may even have a car alarm. When you leave your house, you don’t leave windows standing open, and you lock the doors behind you. You may even count your change at the grocery store. Most of us do these things, and we do them because we are aware that not everyone around us is as honest as we’d like them to be. We do it in order to keep our stuff from being stolen.

Unfortunately, both yourself and your daugher have to realize that, until your son has progressed a great deal in his therapy, he will not be as honest as you’d like him to be. That being the case, you need to take similar steps to keep your stuff from being stolen. Your daughter needs to learn to do the same thing. Make sure that she has a room with a lock, so that she can keep the things that are valuable to her safe, and encourage her not to leave things lying around.

At the same time, you should limit your son’s access to things. If he cannot be trusted with other people’s things then his access to these things should be limited. We installed alarms on our nephew’s bedroom door that would let us know if he left his room at night, and we kept the things that were most important to us behind our own locked bedroom door.

At this point in your son’s life, he does not have a fully developed conscience so he doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to take something from his sister. Oh, it’s quite likely that he is aware that this is something that he might get in trouble for but, because he has no empathy for his sister’s feelings, this probably simply heightens the excitement and the feeling of power that he gets from being able to take it and defy you to prove that he did it.

Don’t put yourself in that position. Until he is healed, assume that he did it. However, because he doesn’t feel guilt or remorse over what he has done, the usual disciplinary measures aren’t going to deter him. Instead, you need to reduce the opportunities that he has to steal through locks, alarms, and repetition.

One thing that I had a hard time learning is that repetition works. In simple words, tell him why it is wrong to steal; and repeat that, using the same (or very similar) words each time. This is something that can be effective over the long-term whether the subject is stealing or kicking the dog. You should do this in much the same way that you might explain things to a toddler, remembering that he didn’t get it then.

While I know that it will be impossible to do so in every instance, try not to get too excited over his stealing. Never let him believe that it is okay with you, and always ensure that there is an appropriate consequence for stealing, but be aware that anger simply feeds into his disorder.

Most importantly, now that your son has an attachment therapist, you should consider her to be your therapist as well, since any good attachment therapist will recognize the importance of attachment parenting, and be more than willing to act as a resource. Read the books that she assigned to you, and ask her what to do when your son steals from your daughter. Perhaps she can help you come up with some appropriate consequences for this behavior. Don’t be afraid to bounce things off of your son’s therapist, since that’s a big part of her job.

– ken

I understand that it’s something on the order of a sin to neglect a blog for more than a few days, yet I have done this. Let me explain.

I’ve never been very good at multitasking when it comes to large projects. Oh, I can handle a variety of small things at once but once I get involved in a significant project, it consumes my time.

Not only have I neglected the blog, but I have all but ignored some of the tasks through which I derive an income, as well.

The project is a combined one, and I have finally gotten far enough in it to consider that maybe I can come up for air, if only for a moment.

The RadKid.Org Directory has become a huge project and, I think, an even larger success, particularly the treatment section.

As of this writing, I have worked my way alphabetically through the states as far as Washington, with only West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming remaining. There are 582 entries to the treatment section, mostly to attachment centers and attachment therapists.

Some of them, of course, will contain errors, or may point to people who are no longer providing attachment therapy, or who may have moved since my last information. That can be easily corrected, but only with the help of a lot of other people, both parents of children receiving therapy and therapists themselves.

Realizing that the directory format limited me to listing only those therapists, clinics and centers which had web sites, leaving out the bulk of people who are providing attachment therapy, I created the RadKid.Org AT Directory, using a wiki format, which would permit anyone to add a listing for an attachment therapist who they might be aware of, and which would allow the therapists themselves to greatly expand upon their own listings.

That last part hasn’t happened yet, but I am confident that it will.

Much of the listings that you will find for attachment therapists in the RadKid.Org Directory are linked to stub pages that I have added to the RadKid.Org AT Directory, providing basic contact information only.

It is my hope that therapists will avail themselves of the opportunity to expand upon their own listings, to multiple pages if they wish, or that I can replace these listing with links to the therapist’s own web sites, as they create them or I come across them.

At this time, I am listing only attachment therapists in the RadKid.Org AT Directory, which will include any therapist providing attachment therapy, not exclusive to those providing only attachment therapy. I chose not to include centers or clinics here because most of them have their own web sites that can be linked to from the RadKid.Org Directory, and I’d rather link to your site than my own.

Later, I might include a section for those providing respite, attachment training, or other services.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. It will never be done since there are always new things to be added, but I am confident that the RadKid.Org Directory is already the most comprehensive listing of attachment resources available, and that the RadKid.Org AT Directory has the potential to become a huge resource for attachment therapists and parents seeking attachment assistance.

Those of you looking for help in West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming … I’ll get to you soon enough.

Please let me know what you think. Let others know about it as well, and please don’t be afraid to link to it from your site. Better yet, I welcome you to participate in the project.

Soon, I’ll get back to posting more regular updates to the RadKid.Org Blog. I apologize for my absence.

– ken