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