6 Tips for Connecting with Your Teenager
Now that my children are in their teens, and I’m working with and talking to many parents of teens, I get asked a lot about how to connect with teenagers. While children growing up and building their own social networks is part of the normal developmental process, it can be hard when your once talkative, open, elementary-aged child begins to spend more and more time in their room, talking to friends, and we begin to feel like we are losing them to devices. Harder still is when you are parenting a child with trauma or abuse that you may not have had much connecting time with before they began the transformation into adolescence.
Fear not parents! Adolescence, while a challenging new time for you and your teenager, can also be a wonderful time of growth and new connections for you both. Even if you have had a rocky path thus far, it is not too late. Our latest scientific understanding about adolescence is that it is an excellent time to build new understandings about relationships and parents still have a very important role to play in this process. To that effect, here are a few ways you can build your connections with your teenager when the old ways don’t seem to work so well anymore.
1. Always remember, you are part of their team. Teens and parents can quickly fall into an us vs. them mentality. This does not have to be the case! After all, why are you trying to play detective to figure out their social media activity? Well, to make sure they are safe of course! Instead of “I caught you doing something you weren’t allowed to do!” consider addressing the issue from a place of concern. “I’m worried about the choices you’re making. You deserve to be safe from people that could be out to harm you and sharing personal information with someone you met online could make you vulnerable.”
This does not mean there are no consequences for breaking a rule. In the above example, it would make sense to follow up with, “I’m going to hold on to your phone until we have re-established the trust between us.” In essence, the message goes from the traditional “caught you being bad or sneaky” to “I know you slipped up and I’m going to be part of your team to help you make better choices.” In a “caught you being bad” scenario, it is easy for a youth to get side-tracked into being resentful about the consequence rather than thinking about what caused the consequence in the first place. I the “caught you” method is one you have been using, expect it to take some time before your child starts to see you as part of their team as they may have you pegged as the punisher.
2. Be real. Adolescence is when we figure out our parents are not perfect. We already knew this about ourselves and it is time to own it! The more real you are about your imperfections (no I don’t mean your hips are too big, think character flaws like being a perfectionist, or messy) the more teens can talk to you about theirs. Own up to things you’d like to work on in yourself and invite conversations about this from your kids too. An example in my family is when I was reading the book “Smart but Scattered.” One of my kids asked about it and the whole family ended up sitting around and taking the executive functioning quizzes together at the start of the book and laughing about who had what things they do well or need help with. We then had a light-hearted conversation about what we would like to work on. These conversations can be fun! Even when it’s not light-hearted, it is important to be real. We teach people how to treat us, mostly by how we treat them. If your child accuses you of an attitude and you realize you actually had one, admit it! You will earn their respect for admitting it and pave the way for them to admit it when they have one as well. In turn, expect them to reciprocate in relationships and be real with them if you think they are not. Frank conversations, without shaming them, will help their brain develop the understandings of what it takes to be in a reciprocal relationship.
3. Allow do-overs. Have you ever said something and immediately wished you could take it back? Have you ever had your intentions misunderstood? Of course you have! Teens are no different. In fact, they are developing the part of their brains that help them learn to reflect on their behaviors. It is our job as parents to help them reflect on their behaviors, not our responses. If we come at them with the attitude we think they have, even if they didn’t intend for it to come out that way, we will definitely get attitude back. A simple, “Are you asking for my help?” in response to a demand can give your adolescent a moment to think. If they say they are asking, give them a chance and say, “Can you ask me nicely? I’d love to help if I can.” While it may seem to go against what we have been taught, I know it certainly was for me, remember- your goal was for you to have them ask you nicely in the first place. If we give them space to do this, doesn’t that meet the goal you were seeking while keeping the two of you a team? Some quick and easy ways to signal the opportunity for a do-over for your teen (said with a playful smile if at all possible): Try it again nicely and you’ll get a better answer! Are you asking or telling? I’d love to say yes- help me out. I know you can ask nicer than that, show me! Do this helps to avoid the shut down in conversations that can come with a more traditional approach where parents might respond to a demanding tone with an equally demanding tone to address it leading to anger and, again, a child who is focused on a parents response, rather than their actions.
4. Be the coach not the warden. Dr. Karyn Purvis, the mother of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) tells us to be the coach not the warden of our teens. After all, the major brain development that is happening for our teens is the development of the frontal lobe, our problem-solving, time managing, multi-step process, self-reflective powerhouse. In order to build this part of our brains we need a lot of opportunities to reflect on what we would have done differently, problem-solve, mess up time management and multi-step processes so we can learn differently next time, etc. In order to do this we have to have a lot of trial and error along the way and MANY things to reflect upon. The best way parents can help to develop this frontal lobe is by coaching your child through it whenever possible rather than punishing for mistakes. Punishing stops the conversation, while coaching is a teaching moment.
Think of your best coaches. When I think of my best coaches, they often had their arm around my shoulders giving me ideas of how I could do it better next time, not taking something away or threatening me. Remember, the best coaches don’t go out on the field and do it for you, they give tips and pointers, they are happy for you when you succeed and, with care, they help you figure out what went wrong. I want to please my coach, while, if I had a warden, my focus would be more on staying out of trouble which would be more likely to mean deceiving them than actually sharing my struggles.
5. Be Playful. Teens and parents alike come into my office bewildered by the massive changes that can happen to a family in the span of just a couple of years. Kids get to high school and parents see how little time we actually have left to teach our children what they need to know to go out in the world just as we begin to see them less and less! It can be easy to forget that some of the same playfulness we had when they were younger is still important. Instead, we find ourselves directing them about what to do or feeling like we only have ten minutes so we better cram in some important knowledge or life skill. In studies about learning, one thing that is clear and that is that learning happens through play.
Playfulness with a teenager looks different (sometimes) than playfulness with a younger child, but it is still vital for keeping connections strong. It really does not take much time to do this and, by being playful, which can be as simple as keeping a lighter tone while talking to them, when it is important to talk about grades or to coach them through one of the harder lessons, you will have a stronger foundation which will make them more open to taking in what you have to say. Playfulness is especially important with a child with a traumatic history as it disarms the fight, flight, freeze, appease part of the brain that is more easily triggered even in teens without a history of trauma. Dad jokes, sharing silly memes, playing cards or having a little friendly family competition to see who gets to decide where you get pizza from next time you order out are all great ways to keep playfulness in your life with a teenager. Don’t be put off by the rolling of their eyes when you do it.
6. Remember the main goal. In the end, what is our goal? I know mine is to raise adults who can take care of themselves, contribute to reciprocal relationships and seek help appropriately when needed. I want my kids to look at me and see they have a supporter but not an enabler who is friendly but not a friend. I want them to remember their mom had their backs, even if having their backs means helping them to see the ways they could have done things differently.
In the end, we want to stay connected with our adolescents and this is our chance to start building the relationship we would like to continue with them into adulthood. One where they can call you when they need guidance and find that what you have to say is helpful and meaningful. We all want our kids to know we have their backs!
What is discussed in this post gives a long-term view of what we need to do to be connected to our teens, look for my next post with ideas about how to do this on a day to day, practical basis with ideas for activities and check ins that can work with your adolescent!
Share how you connect with your teens, or your challenges in the comments…
Happy Parent Tip #1
English: Houston, TX., 9/8/2005 — Elementary school students wave good bye to their parents as they leave the Reliant center for their first day of school in Texas. They are sheltered at the Reliant center and were evacuated from Louisianna. FEMA photo/Andrea Booher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
written by, Kate Oliver, MSW, LCSW-C
One super amazing thing about my job is that I get to see and learn so much from the parents that I work with. Even before my own children reach a particular age or stage, I have acquired knowledge about the issues that come with a particular time in a child’s life. Over the years I have amassed a wonderful body of learning which has helped me enormously in my own practice as well as with my own children. I feel blessed to have found the job that I have and from time to time, I would like to share some of the tips and understandings that I have come to which have created happier moments for me as a parent and for the parents I have worked with.
Tip number 1 is:
Give your child room to take ownership of their own responsibilities and accomplishments.
Here is a situation I am sure many of us can relate to:
It is time for school. You steel yourself for the daily battle of shoes, coats, and getting to the bus on time. Won’t your children ever learn how to tell time? Don’t they understand that the bus waits for no child and that you have to get to work on time? Within the first month of school you find yourself in the daily cycle of first gently reminding your children of the next step in the morning routine, then, getting firmer with your voice and using your best “I’m serious” tone to get them closer to the door, until you finally get tired of the games the children are playing and either start yelling or start resentfully doing activities they are more than capable of doing had they just managed their time in the ways you suggested.
This is an example of you caring more about your child getting to school than they do. And, really, if you are going to do something and take pride in it, you have to care. As adults we can see this when we go to a store with poor customer service. It is clear that the employees do not take ownership or pride in the running of the store most likely because they have not taken on the understanding that the quality of customer services reflects on them as well as the owners.
Of course it is important to remember your child’s age and developmental stage. For the example of going to school on time a kindergartener, will need much more help than a freshman in high school to get out the door. Also, if asked to in a respectful way, I am all for parents helping children in the morning just as you would want them to help you if you were running late as long as it is not a daily expectation.To illustrate ways you can help your child become more self-motivated rather than allowing you to carry all of the responsibility, you could say any of the following statements that you think would work for your child in a loving way that may cause your child to pause, think and re-prioritize. In the following suggestions I am focusing on elementary school, but they can work well for middle and high school as well although you can expect some verbal push-back.
- I’m not going to work harder to get you to school than you do anymore. You know what time you need to leave. It is up to you to get to the bus on time.
- I wonder what else you have to do to get ready for school? (they know the routine already, they have just been allowing you to do all the thinking for them thus far).
- If we are late, I hope I’m not asked to write a note to excuse you because I won’t be able to do that without telling them why. (You can feel free to fill in the blanks here: Suzie didn’t feel like getting out of bed, taking her shower, etc.) If your child is late after you say this you cannot write an excuse note and you must allow for an unexcused tardy. Otherwise they will know you care more about it than they do.
- I have had several parents who absolutely needed to get kids on the bus on time for work reasons in the morning who told the school that they were going to send their child in pajamas if they refused to get ready in the morning. These parents would pack an outfit for the child to put on at school. (hint: do not pack your child’s favorite clothes)
- If you end up driving a child to school, you can have them pay you back for your time later by saying, “I had to use my time to fix your mistake this morning. You owe me the ten minutes it took me to take you to school. Now I need you to….”
- Don’t forget that when a child has gotten themselves out the door on time, you want to point it out and ask them if they are happy with themselves. Reinforce the good feeling your child has about being on time and point out that there was no yelling, arguing or fussing.
While I know that everything can not be turned so that you help your child find their own initiative for making good decisions (I find it difficult to get children to understand that it benefits them to go to bed on time, for example), there are many times that I see parents, and I include myself in this group, taking on the emotional work for children. Many responsibility issues that cause conflict in families can be eased into in this way, grades, chores, clean rooms, curfews. Sometimes in the process of making our child’s life easier by doing things for them, we can forget that we may also be depriving them of important lessons about taking responsibility for themselves, and learning to manage success and learning opportunities with dignity and a forgiving heart. By stepping back and remembering why we care in the first place, we can realign our own priorities as parents. Ultimately, we want our children to do the things we ask because we love them and we want to learn responsibility etc. so they can have a happier adult life. The best way to do this is to help children see the ways in which taking responsibility is helpful to them, rather than telling them it is important.
What is something you could use help getting your child to take more responsibility for?
Related articles
- Chronological Age vs. Developmental Age (help4yourfamily.com)
- Are You An Overprotective Parent? (mamasbagoftricks.blogspot.com)
- Trash Your Behavior Charts! (help4yourfamily.com)
- End the Hassle! Tell Kids What They Deserve. (help4yourfamily.com)
Why Sexual Abuse is Never a Child’s Fault…Not Even a Teenager
written by, Kate Oliver, LCSW-C
English: Join the movement to end child abuse: http://www.1stand.org (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The news was atwitter this past week with the story of the judge, who has since apologized, sort of, for stating that the 14-year-old girl, Cherice Moralez, who killed herself after her teacher molested her was “older than her chronological age” and that “It’s not probably the kind of rape most people think about,”… “It was not a violent, forcible, beat-the-victim rape, like you see in the movies. But it was nonetheless a rape. It was a troubled young girl, and he was a teacher. And this should not have occurred.” (cnn.com) I do not know this case, or this girl. I am not going to comment on this family’s pain other than to try to use their situation to create better understanding of all children who have experienced sexual abuse.
I have worked with people who have been molested for quite a while now and while many people know the company line is to say that it is never the victim’s fault, I do find that as adults it can be difficult to understand why we say that. It is true that 2 out of 3 teen victims know their abusers. In cases where a child knows his or her abuser, it is much more often the case that a child or teen was tricked into performing sexual acts rather than, as this judge envisioned a “forcible attack.”
Child abuse is difficult to think about, so many of us, when given the option, simply choose not to. It is not until we have someone close to us that is affected that we begin to examine our own underlying belief about abuse. I am glad when adults share what they really believe about their child’s abuse with me so that we can address the questions about whether a child participated in his or her own molestation, rather than continuing to hold onto a belief that a child might have done so, a belief that can unknowingly be conveyed to the child through actions, body language and words. In this article, I would like to address some of the questions that survivors and parents of survivors have brought to me over the years which may be difficult to answer unless you have had some time to reflect upon it:
“Why didn’t the child tell anyone that he/she was being abused? Doesn’t that mean she/he might have wanted it?”
Children do not tell about abuse for a variety of reasons. Most often an abuser is someone known to the child. The abuser often tells the child that they (the child and the abuser) will be in BIG trouble if the child tells anyone. Abusers are often very good about convincing children they are participating in the wrongful behavior, even when a child says they do not want to. Sometimes an abuser suggests or threatens that if a child tells they will be removed from their home, the abuser will be fired and will not be able to take care of his family, no one will believe the child didn’t want it, that the child misinterpreted the abusers actions, and on and on. It is not difficult to convince children, even teenagers, that they are in control of whether the abuser is in trouble or not. It is a normal part of development to believe that the world in some senses revolves around us so, when an abuser presents the case that his or her world, as well as the child’s parents world and even other relatives, revolves around the teens choice to tell or keep quiet, it becomes easier to understand how a child, even a teen, especially a teen would keep quiet. Should a teen figure out he or she has been tricked, the shame of feeling tricked can keep them quiet as well.
“Yes, but my child was a teenager when this happened, he/she should have known better.”
This is probably the most common issue I hear from parents, family and friends of teens, and even the teen themselves who are abused by adult caregivers. It can be difficult to understand how teenagers who have learned about abuse, and whose parents have told them since childhood to tell if someone is abusing them would still keep from telling. I have even had adolescents who have tried to convince me that they were a party to their own abuse and that they are guilty of participating. I understand how teens and their parents can feel this way and when they do here is what I say. “Think about you two years ago. Were you different?” If you take a moment to think about the difference between a fourteen and sixteen year old, anyone who has had a child either of those ages knows there is a difference. A sixteen year old will absolutely tell you they are different from how they were two years ago, they have different friends, they know more, they have different interests or have increased their skill in an ongoing interest. Then I ask, “Do you think in two years you might be different from the way you are now? If so, what will the differences be?” Of course we all know we will be different in two years. We will have two more years worth of experience and information. We will have two more years of practicing independence, understanding relationships, etc. Last, I point out the difference in age between the abused and the abuser, say it’s fifteen years and say, “So this person had fifteen more years than you to figure out the stuff you are figuring out now. They had fifteen years more experience in relationships and getting what you want in relationships. They had fifteen more years to figure out how to talk someone into giving them what they wanted. Oh yeah, and how many serious relationships have you had?” What people often fail to realize is that for the child, this is their very first introduction to sexual relationships and they are simply outmatched by someone who has honed their skills of manipulation to lure the child into believing that they are on even cognitive ground and therefore in an equal relationship. This cannot possibly be the case when you think about it. While some teens are very good at acting mature and responsible, they do not yet have the ability to determine who is and isn’t trying to trick them and they cannot possibly have the understanding of adult relationships that only comes with experience.
“She/he always seemed older in a sexual way.”
Yes, I hear this one too and my response to this is simple…how does a child come to seem older in a sexual way in the first place? Often it does not take much looking to see why this might seem true. Is this a child that was previously sexualized by another abuser? Is this a child that has been taught that her (could be a he but I find this argument most often to be about girls) looks and looking sexual is something that is rewarded in her family? Has this child been exposed to a lot of media that encourages young girls to act in sexual ways? Does this child live in a family where you do not get noticed unless you are acting out making it easier for her to get tricked by someone who treats her special? Were these circumstances also the child’s fault, or do these circumstances explain the ways in which this child was made into a target for a predator? Just because a child has learned to act in a certain way, or dress in a certain way, it does not mean that the child has the same cognitive abilities of an adult. It does however, give manipulative abusers a heads up that they are an easier target.
While we don’t like to think about these things, it is important before we make a statement that impacts an average of 1/3 of the people in the room, that we take the time to arm ourselves with knowledge. Yes, approximately 28% of the population in the United States will be sexually victimized by the age of 17. Knowledge is power and if you want more knowledge, try some of these links:
If you want to learn more about protecting your child from abuse try my posts:
It’s Not Just Strangers: Protecting Young Children From Abuse Part I
It’s Not Just Strangers: Spotting Potential Abusers Part II
Teaching Young Children about Stranger Danger
And, if you believe anyone you know is suicidal like Cherice Moralez, please look up my posts:
Naming Patterns Changes Patterns
written by, Kate Oliver, LCSW-C 
Update: I’ve been on hiatus from writing for a while and I return with good news. I’ve been asked to contribute a couple of chapters to the new Kinship Parenting Toolbox, scheduled to be released in Fall of 2013. For updates on the upcoming book you can “like” the Facebook page: TheKinshipParentingToolbox .
It can be hard to break old routines. Do you ever find yourself doing the same habitual complaining, arguing, nagging or run around? One way to break the pattern is to name it and even insert a little humor. It only took my husband and I the first ten years of our marriage to figure this one out. It is rare for us to travel without each other. It happens maybe once or twice a year. At some point one of us figured out that whenever we were traveling without the other we got into an argument the night before over nothing I can remember. We always parted annoyed. I can’t remember who figured it out but during one such argument one of us happened to say something along the lines of, “Do we always have to fight before one of us leaves?” Hmmm. We got curious for a minute and figured out the pattern. Instead of digging into our old routine, we changed it up a bit. When it happened again (yes it happened again). One of us said, “Oh, this is the part where we fight because you’re leaving tomorrow.” It completely took the wind out of the sails of that fight. We actually laughed. We were arguing because we love each other and were going to miss each other’s company. Getting curious about the ritual and finding a loving meaning behind it, rather than sitting alone in angry confusion helped us to get past it and even laugh about it. Naming what is really going on behind a tiff is now a regular ritual for my husband and I. It makes our marriage happier and stronger. We laugh a lot.
We can do this with children too. Instead of winding into the same old argument, put on a silly voice, I prefer Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
Eeyore as depicted by Disney (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
and say, “Oh dear, this is where I ask you to put your shoes on and you tell me you don’t know where they are and wait for me to find them.”
Shake your head and dramatically cry out, “Why must I daily be plagued by missing shoes?!?!” (Think over-dramatic Lady Violet from Downton Abbey if you are a fan).
downton-abbey-episode-7 (Photo credit: Evian Tsai)
The typical response of children is to look at you like you have three heads, then start looking for the shoes during this fun game you just started. The trick is, if you are going to be dramatic, be really over the top.
Of course you can do it in a slightly more serious way, like my husband and I did. But with kids, I like dramatic, silly, “out crazy the crazy” as Christine Moers says. She speaks about it in relation to traumatized and attachment disordered children but I see it work with all children and, quite honestly, it’s just more fun than being so darn serious all the time. I mean, don’t you ever get tired of the tit for tat stuff that goes on in your home? You know, the “you did this so now I have to do that” stuff between you and the other members of your household or between siblings? Next time you see a pattern you’re tired of, go ahead and try naming it. Start with checking your tone to make it silly or light and say something like “This is when we…” or “This is the part where I usually…” or “Oh, I think I know what’s going on here. We’ve done this before! This is where…”
Let me know how it works!
Related links:
The Perils of Perfectionism in Parenting (help4yourfamily.com)
Laugh and Your Family Laughs With You (help4yourfamily.com)
Parent Affirmation Monday- Curious (help4yourfamily.com)
This is your brain on attachment
The Brain Limbic System (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Over the years, I have come to learn that the cure for any kind of burnout, life burnout, work burnout, parenting burnout is two-fold. One part is incorporating self-care into your everyday routine so that it is no longer a question of whether you have time for it, it is just something you do, just like you get dressed in the morning. The second part of burnout prevention and or recovery is training and education. Often we feel burnt out because we feel ineffective at what we do, we wonder if we are doing our job, whether it be our job as parents, as part of a couple, as part of our employment or something else, well.
Recently I was able to have a few days of burnout prevention when I went to two wonderful continuing education workshops as well as taught my own full day training to other professionals, and, every teacher knows, when you are teaching, you are also learning. It’s always with very cautious optimism that I enter a training day, especially with someone I have never learned from and even more so when it has to do with something I find incredibly intimidating…brain functioning. I’ve always hoped just to be able to send healing messages to the subconsious rather than figure out the in’s and out’s of the ways the brain works. It turns out though that with the right teachers this stuff is actually pretty fascinating and even someone who shys away from science can learn a lot. What I learned was the reasons why much of what we do in working with building secure attachments between parents and children is so important to overall healthy brain functioning and just how much children have to teach us about the ways we learn and grow best. In my two trainings, the first with Terry Levy and Mark Owen from the Evergreen Clinic in Colorado, I learned about healing adult attachment related issues. In the second training, with Daniel Hughes and John Baylin, I learned about using our knowledge of brain functioning to help children with early insecure attachment styles. And now, I’m going to share some of what they taught me with you. By no means am I giving you all the information these guys taught me and I would highly recommend you see them should they come to your town. They all do trainings for both professionals and for parents.
Don’t Flip Your Lid!
Hold your hand in front of you with your thumb tucked in
Curl your fingers down around your thumb.
You are looking at a rough replica of your brain. There are three basic parts: 1. The back of your hand to your wrist represents your brain stem, which is responsible mainly for your body’s basic functioning (breathing, circulation, etc.); 2. Your thumb, tucked there in the middle, represents your limbic system. I think of your limbic system as your “first responders.” If you have heard of people in the midst of a crisis or threat having a fight, flight or freeze reaction, this is coming from your limbic system. Your limbic system takes in and interprets information way faster than any other part of your brain and it does not, for example, think first then shoot later, it sees danger and responds to get you out of danger quickly. 3. Your fingers represent your frontal lobe. They are the part of the brain that develops last and give us the ability to reflect on our actions, make more complicated, thoughtful decisions and maintain self control. This part of the brain is still developing well into our twenties.
Obviously I have made this brain thing about as basic as it gets. If you would like a longer lesson, click here and watch Dan Seigal, neuroscientist extraordinaire explain it in more detail.
Now, if you still have your fingers curled around your thumb I want you to lift them up again, we’ll call your finger your “lid.” John Baylin taught us that in large part as children much of our growing up process involves learning not to “flip your lid” or, in other words, not to allow our limbic system to work in a state of constant response, but rather to keep our “lid” intact, using our frontal lobe to think in more complex ways and to reflect upon what we did, are doing and would like to do. This job is a task we all must work on and we certainly know (or are) adults that flip that lid quite a bit when presented with a stresser. The problem is that once our lid is flipped, we have to figure out how to put it back on, this is how we develop strong coping and problem solving skills.
Stay tuned for more posts explaining about the ways in which our brains function and how to help children with attachment disorders that have caused delayed brain development to rework those neural passage ways and literally rewrite your child’s attachment script.
Related Posts:
- PLACE Parenting (help4yourfamily.com)
- The Spectrum of Attachment (help4yourfamily.com)
- The Art of Breathing (help4yourfamily.com)
Letting Go of the Parent You Thought You Would Be
Written by, Kate Oliver, MSW, LCSW-C
It seems to me that many parents I come across in my practice are in a grieving process without being fully aware of it. I would venture a guess that there are many parents outside of my practice who are grieving as well. Grieving, while often associated with death, is really just a word that describes a transition from one reality to another. Transitions have stages that go along with grief like, sadness, denial, blaming, anger, bargaining, and relief. We can grieve relationships with or without death. We can grieve changes, like moving from a home we have loved to a new home- even if we are excited about the move. What I think most parents grieve is the fantasy they had about the parent they thought they would be. We all have those thoughts before we become parents, then, after becoming parents, we have days where we question what the heck we were thinking in the first place.
I remember having my first daughter. I was so excited and felt so much joy that she was coming. I was allowed that pure joy because I did not fully understand at that time, nor could I really without experiencing it, the enormous undertaking I was embarking upon. I remember that almost confused feeling, where my husband and I wondered aloud how it was that we came to the hospital, two of us, and left with a whole extra person. All the nurse needed to check was that we had a car seat properly installed. I’m sure the same is true for adoption and fostering as well. One day there are two of you, or one person on your own and the next day there is a whole extra person who does not know a thing about your expectations (even if you told them) and they are just there…all the time.
I think of those emotions, in contrast to having my second daughter, where I cried in the delivery room before I had her. When my husband asked me why I was crying, I told him I was happy, but I was also scared. I knew then the awesome responsibility we were taking on. We were responsible for a human life…two of them! Even with the knowledge that we had a supportive family and community around us I still felt that feeling, you know, that knowing that “the buck stops here.” I wanted to be a good parent and, even with all my training as a social worker, I knew it was going to be tough to feel successful as a parent.
I know too, that for parents adopting children at an older age, there is an added complexity. When you adopt an older child, you don’t have the advantage that parent of infants have in that, when you figure out you do not know what the heck you are doing, your child does not understand that you are just figuring this stuff out too. Instead, you have a child who is probably a bit hypervigilant, who is looking to see if you do know what you are doing, and who is actively testing you every step of the way (usually without naps). Even if you have already raised biological children, you have now taken on a child with a history you did not control and that was not ideal. They are going to be vigilant in their seeking to see if you know what you are doing, as you realize that really, lots of times you don’t, even if you went to all the trainings about therapeutic parenting.
A few weeks ago, I was laughing with a mom in my office when she told me she thought adopting internationally would be great, her son would be used to other children, having spent the first year of his life in an orphanage with other children. She would put him into daycare right away, where he would be familiar with other children, then she could keep working, and sometimes she and her husband could sneak away for dates periodically. She told me this after we had just spent the session with me reinforcing the importance of this mom spending time alone with her husband, since she had been a stay at home mom and they had not had a date in the three years since they brought their child home.
We parents all know that the actual day to day realities of raising children are different, perhaps vastly different, than what we expected. Some of it is more amazing than we could have ever imagined. Parenting can be funny, serious, exciting, and tiring! No matter what, it is always different than we thought it would be.
The children I see most often come with an unique set of challenges. They have been traumatized. Their brains work differently than other children’s brains due to neglect or drug use while they were in utero. They have experienced loss. Their hearts have been broken. In a harsher, less gradual way, the parents I see recognize that the children that live with them, sometimes children they have not had an opportunity to fall in love with yet, if they were adopted at an older age, need more than our traditional notions of parenting have afforded us. Biological parents can find this out as well. We live in a new age of parenting where there really is no dominant model for parents to follow. The media loves to tell you how to raise your child the “best” way until, if you were to try to simultaneously follow all the advice, you would feel schizophrenic trying to figure out whether you are supposed to tell them what to do, let them figure it out themselves, hover, or hang back, stay home or work… the list is endless.
I think a big part of the grieving I see in parents is grieving the loss of knowing what you are supposed to do! As a single, or even in a couple, before those little ones came along, we knew which days were sleeping in days. We ran our own schedules. We thought when the kids came we still would know what to expect in a given day, remember? Remember transitioning from most of the time being your time, to your time feeling like stolen time where you had to weigh whether it was “worth it” to take time for yourself away from your children? I remember before children, going to the movies with my husband and turning around to go home without seeing a movie because we had already seen all the movies that were worth seeing. One day we will get there again…maybe.
Until then, we will go through a series of transitions. We will transition from knowing where our child learned everything, to hearing them have a thought or bring home an understanding from someplace else. We will watch our children prove to us over and over that while we can attempt to control their outside world, we do not have total control over their inside world as they will have their own unique interpretations of the world as they see it. We will realize we can not shield them from pain, nor can we make them forget the pain they have already experienced in the way we fantasized we could. We will see our own understanding of parenting shift as well. The parent we thought we would be makes way for the parent that we are becoming. Often, we find that rather than being the parent we imagined we would be, we must adapt to becoming the parent our unique children need us to be.
What have been some of the transitions you have made as a parent that surprised you?
Related Posts:
Messing Up Children in Just the Right Ways (help4yourfamily.com)
A Quick Primer on Early Primary Relationships (help4yourfamily.com)
To Parents Who Worry Their Children Will Harm Others (help4yourfamily.com)
Quick Self-Care for Parents (help4yourfamily.com)
Older Kids with Bathroom Issues: Why Does it Happen? How Can You Help? Part 2
English: Typical Male Restroom in the U.S. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Written by, Kate Oliver, MSW, LCSW-C
In last week’s post, we looked at the possible origin for encopresis (soiling after the usual age for toilet training) and enuresis (wetting after the usual toilet training age) in older children with a history of trauma and/or neglect.There is something about an older child wetting or soiling themselves that can send parents into a fury, especially if the incident is perceived to be intentional. This is understandable. We all have buttons, and a big one for many of us involve the transmission of germs whether it’s via spit, mucus, vomit, urine or feces, we don’t want to be around it!
In this week’s post, now that you have a theory from last week about where the issue originates, I want to help you to figure out what to do to help your older child, who will often experience shame as a result of the incident. If you have any questions about implementing any of these strategies, I hope you will ask in the comments section, or discuss it with your child’s therapist.* One of the reasons I am writing this post is because there are very few therapists who specialize in this issue, so if your child’s therapist is not familiar with it, please think about printing out and taking in this article.
As I stated in the first post on older children with bathroom related problems, the first intervention is always to follow the suggestion of your child’s physician as we do not want to fix a broken bone with a band-aid and some medical intervention may be necessary. As sensitive as I know parents are about this issue, children are also very sensitive about it, even if they pretend to be aloof. In fact, I know one of the beliefs parents have that send them into a fury about older children wetting and soiling, is that their child does not even care about the fact that they are doing it when, in reality, often children that have this issue are experts at covering up their feelings so you do not know how humiliated/ angry/ frustrated they are.
Before I give you suggestions, I want to give two important guidelines for all the interventions I use with children. My number one guideline is to follow the PLACE parenting attitude whether your child has attachment disturbance or not. The second is to make sure your child is primed to receive help from you. What I mean by that is, ask your child if they want help. If they say “no,” DO NOT OFFER IT. When you offer children help and they don’t want it, you are only listening to yourself talk and asking to be frustrated. If you offer it, then back off. After you child has refused a couple of times and their refusal has been listened to and honored, their curiosity begins to take over and eventually they ask you what help you have to offer. Then, and only then, are they open to receiving and they will be primed to listen to your advice.
With that said, here is a list of ways I have helped children with enuresis and encopresis:
1. Especially if you recently adopted or started fostering your child, do not panic! You may have a child who is looking for buttons to push to get you upset or make you reject them. If you have an upset reaction, they may see that it gets a rise out of you and will be more likely to continue. Without over-reacting, try to employ natural consequences, i.e. the child has to clean up the mess as appropriate for their developmental age. Remember to use your PLACE attitude, which means that humiliation and embarrassment of your child are not acceptable consequences. In fact, with a child that would purposefully wet or soil themselves, humiliation and embarrassment may actually reinforce the behavior in ways you did not anticipate. To better understand this concept you can read my Caught in the Loop post.
2. My first suggestion for someone with a child with ongoing problems of this nature is therapy. While my sample is quite skewed, I have not seen any children with this issue that did not experience a feeling of fear about the problem, often accompanied by humiliation, even if the behavior is perceived to be intentional by their parents. While moms and dads can be helpful in navigating those feelings, therapists are trained to add an additional and necessary layer of help. Also, as you well know, children are often more motivated to do something someone else suggests over the suggestion of their parents. You know your children do things for their teachers that they would not do for you and bringing the issue to the child’s attention while in therapy often gives a child an extra bit of motivation to work on it. Additionally, if your child has a history of trauma this includes the bathroom in any way, it is important for them to be able to process this history with a trained professional.
3. My most successful intervention in the area of helping older children with encopresis and enuresis is to reintroduce the idea of toilet training. Before you skip this idea because you think your child is too old to re-potty train, let me tell you that I have used this with children in their early teens with success. The reintroduction is delicate and goes like this (and, as I say in many of my posts, the tone is important…think about how Mr. Rogers would say it):
“I wonder if when you were younger and didn’t get what you needed, you might have missed out on some of the signs your body gives you when you need to go to the bathroom.”
It may take a few times of gently suggesting this to your child for them to begin to get curious with you. Suggest you could help them to learn how their body knows it needs to go. Think about this. Your body knows it needs to go when your bladder feels full. I teach kids to playfully ask their bladders out loud in my office, “Bladder, do you have to go to the bathroom?” You would be amazed how many children have quickly realized by asking that question that they do, indeed need to go…right then…and we end up taking a quick restroom break.
You can also point out that sometimes you have been able to tell when your child needs to go and that when kids are young and have parents that take good care of them, the parents often point out when a child is doing the potty dance. For some kids, we come up with a signal that the parent can make, rather than asking out loud in public whether a child needs to go. This works well with a child who has a history of being shamed or traumatized in relation to going to the bathroom,or who was never potty-trained appropriately.
4. An additional technique to use with children who were not properly potty-trained, is to teach each your child about controlling their bowels. One way I do this is to have children picture a balloon full of water. I tell them to picture the balloon turn over so that the opening of the balloon is on the bottom. If you are using your fingers to pinch the balloon, it is like the muscles around your bladder holding the pee or poop in. If you were to let go with your fingers, you would see the water come out of the balloon. For some balloons, you would have to give an extra squeeze from the top to empty it out. Bladders can be like this too. When I work with kids with issues controlling their bowels, I suggest to them that they picture the balloon as their bladder every time they need to go to the bathroom. Muscles hold the urine until you get to the toilet, then they let go and we make sure your bladder is emptied completely. For kids with urinary issues that are feeling brave, I also suggest kegals, where they start urinating, then try to stop the urine one or two times every time they go in order to build up the muscles (consult with a physician to make sure this is a good idea for your child).
Also, and many adults do not know this, there is a right way and a wrong way to empty your bowels. To most easily and completely empty your bladder, teach children to sit, leaning forward with their forearms resting on their thighs. Have a small stool near the toilet so children can put their feet on the stool making it so their knees are higher than their hips. This will help kids that hold onto stool and urine, to most easily and quickly relax and let go when they are going to the bathroom.
5. For kids with bowel issues, especially kids that hold it until it gets painful, I teach a quick exercise to help them control bowel functioning. This is good for relaxation as well. Lie on the floor and counting slowly to five, suck your belly in. Picture your belly button touching your spine. Then, again to a slow count of five, push your belly out until your belly button is actually sticking up. See if you can make the pulling your belly in, equal in time to the pushing of your belly out. Ideally, kids who are learning to control their bowels will do this exercise for 3 minutes a day. The typical response I get from kids when I teach them this exercise and they actually do it in my office is a moment afterward when they start to get excited (like the potty dance) then a request to go to the bathroom. Success!
For children where this does not work, see about helping them find a Pilates class in your area. Many of the Pilates exercises, strengthen the core and pelvic muscles allowing for greater control.
4. I find the toughest kids with bathroom issues are typically the ones who are doing urinating and soiling on purpose, although often the times they do it are few and far between. As I recommended in my previous post on this issue, it is important to figure out the why, but really the intervention for purposeful urinaters and soilers is to make sure they are in therapy with someone who works on teaching them to state their feelings. Often these kids need remedial learning in the expression of feelings, and, while parents can do some of this, a child therapist will have the training to find ways that work for your child to teach them the proper expression of big feelings. Sometimes this means helping them to understand that they will not be harshly punished for the expression of their feelings, and others it will mean having a therapist identify that your child may be experiencing a traumatic reenactment.
I know that this is a sensitive topic for many families and people do not want to be identified by leaving comments, however, if you have questions, or a suggestion that works that I forgot, please let me know. You can feel free to leave a comment or to contact me privately via email: helpforyourfamily@gmail.com
*see disclaimer
Related articles
- Older Kids with Bathroom Issues: Why does it happen? How Can You Help? Part 1 (help4yourfamily.com)
- Caught in the Loop: Why People Repeat the Same Bad Choices Over and Over (help4yourfamily.com)
- PLACE Parenting for Children with Attachment Disturbance(help4yourfamily.com)
- Finding a Therapist for a Traumatized and/or Attachment Disordered Child (help4yourfamily.com)
- Chronological Age vs. Developmental Age (help4yourfamily.com)
Older Kids with Bathroom Issues: Why does it happen? How Can You Help? Part 1
White Toilet Bowl in Malaysia (Photo credit: epSos.de)
written by, Kate Oliver, MSW, LCSW-C
No one wants to talk about it. It’s a messy issue, and it stinks…literally. In my practice I see quite a few children who, at a much older age than usual, have bathroom issues, where either they wet themselves at night or during the day. Some even soil themselves. It is often a difficult issue for parents to bring up, and there I times I have seen a child for months before anyone is even willing to mention it, even though it is one of the questions I ask during my initial parent visit for children with attachment related issues. Many of the parents that come to me say it is the most embarrassing of all the issues their child has. It is also the thing that can make parents angry the fastest. After all, if you have a ten-year-old who just wet themselves in your car, it is easy to forget that there might be more going on than lack of self-control. Instead, we tend to focus on the fact that your car smells like urine and a ten-year-old did it!
When a child has a behavior like enuresis (wetting themselves during the night or daytime) or encopresis (soiling themselves), I always look for the root cause. It is important to know where this problem starts because often by knowing where something starts, we can figure out how to fix it in the most loving way possible. In this post I am going to focus on daytime wetting and soiling, as I believe that bed-wetting is an easier issue to find information about and can have a different origin than daytime wetting and soiling which I see most often in children with a history of trauma and neglect.
In my next post we will look at solutions to these problems. Until then, here is a list of questions to help you think about the origin of your child’s issue because when we know the origin, often the solution becomes clear.
1. “Has my child seen a doctor about this issue?” The first place to start with any problems involving the bladder is always with your child’s doctor. Even if your child has not been complaining about a bladder issue. Even if you asked them all the questions that go along with having a bladder infection, still go to get tested. This is important especially if your child has a history of neglect, since they will be more likely to be out of touch with their bodies so they may not be alert to discomfort until it is a major problem. Additionally, even when there is a mental health issue related to a child’s enuresis or encopresis, some children require a medical intervention because, especially for a child that holds on to bowel movements (bm’s), there can be a cycle of holding onto bm’s followed by a painful releasing that can require medical attention in order to stop the pain that reinforces the holding of the bm’s in the first place.
2. “Was my child properly potty-trained?” This may seem like a strange question to ask if you have an eight-year-old, however, if your eight-year-old was being potty trained by an abusive, and or actively drug-using parent, child-care worker, grandparent, etc. during the time when children normally get potty-trained (anywhere from 2-4.5 years old) then they may not have been taught in the ways that they were able to understand. It may be that no one ever walked them through proper wiping procedure after going to the bathroom. It may be that no one ever taught them how to tell if they need to go. Your child may have a developmental lag in this area because they were not able to “master” the developmental milestones that go with being properly potty trained. Additionally, if your child was not properly trained, they may not have developed the muscles that we do not even think about which we use everyday to control our bladder that keep us from our own embarrassing issues.
3. “Does my child have trauma associated with the bathroom?” It may be that your child avoids that bathroom because some bad stuff happened in and/or related to a bathroom at some point, or, they may have experienced trauma related to wetting or soiling themselves. Potty training is reported to be the developmental step during which a child is most likely to experience abuse. If you have a child who has experienced trauma, ask yourself if they may be avoiding the bathroom because it reminds them of something they would rather not think about. Maybe it was a place they hid from someone. Maybe it was a place where they or someone else they loved got hurt. Maybe they were beaten or threatened with harm if they had an accident during potty-training. For children with severe trauma, it may be that they experience a “trigger” wherein they feel terrified, and/or they may be experiencing a traumatic reenactment wherein they are re-experiencing a traumatic situation as their brain’s way of making sense of it and the experience is so intense that they end up peeing on or soiling themselves. An example I have often used comes from when I was a kid myself:
One night I woke up to a small fire in my room. No one was hurt and the house survived but it was scary. The fire truck came and it was pretty clear that things would have been way worse had I not woken up when I did.
Many years later when my children were very small, I remember taking my daughters out to play in the snow. It was a cold day and several people had made fires in their fireplaces. When I went to enter my own home (where we did not have a fire lit), I had a moment when the smell of smoke hit my nose, probably from a nearby chimney. I handed my youngest daughter to my husband and yelled, “Stay out of the house, there’s a fire!” Then I proceeded to run into the house, looking for smoke so I could see where the fire was.
Because I am telling you this story, I’m sure you have figured out by now that there was no fire, however, I can tell you that at the moment I entered my home, I was 100% certain that there was. The smell of smoke was the trigger and I responded accordingly. While it did not involve a wetting or soiling incident (lucky me) I think it does describe how our brains can get tricked for a moment into thinking something is happening again, even when it is not. As I said before, this can sometimes happen with enuresis and encopresis in children of all ages.
4. “Is my child pissed off?” Well, what is the best way to show someone that you are pissed off? Some of the kids that come to see me, intentionally urinate or defecate either on themselves, the furniture, or even mom’s prized photo album. If a child has not been given the tools to express feelings in a reasonable way, they express them in whatever way occurs to them at the time.
Any survivor of abuse or neglect that has not had adequate opportunity or support to process the impact of the trauma often carries an intense level of anger or rage inside. When the anger is not addressed, it comes out in other ways. Even though I have had parents report to me that their child does not act angry when they are urinating on furniture, it is possible that a child with an attachment disorder would seem relatively calm while seething with rage underneath. I liken it to the times when I have gone to the ocean and the lifeguards warned people not to go in the water because the undertow is too strong. The waves look the same to me but there is a pull underwater that you cannot see and that can carry you away from safety. Whether it is because they were not allowed to express feelings for fear of harm, or they gave up on expressing feelings because their feelings were not honored anyway, some children learn that the most effective way to express how they feel is by urinating or defecating intentionally.
5. “Is my child fearful of connection to others?” For children with attachment disorders, it is not uncommon for a child to make themselves seem repellent. I hear a lot about children who refuse to bathe even though they smell terrible, or who have disgusting habits that repulse their parents. If a child is fearful of connection, then feels connection despite that fear, they may do something to make themselves feel more comfortably distant. I see this sometimes when a child comes into my office and we have a moment when the child connects to her mother. Maybe she says something nice about her mom, or they share a hug. For a child where connection is terrifying due to early abuse or neglect, they may subconsciously find a way to reestablish a distance between themselves and their caregivers by wetting or soiling.
Now that we are getting curious about the origins of encopresis and enuresis in older children, in my next post, I will address what we can do about enuretic and encopretic older children.
Related articles:
Older Kids with Bathroom Issues: Why Does it Happen? How Can You Help? Part 2 (help4yourfamily.com)
Caught in the Loop: Why People Repeat the Same Bad Choices Over and Over (help4yourfamily.com)
Parent Affirmation Monday- Curious (help4yourfamily.com)
Chronological Age vs. Developmental Age (help4yourfamily.com)
Caught in the Loop: Why People Repeat the Same Bad Choices Over and Over
train circle (Photo credit: bitmapr)
written by, Kate Oliver, LCSW-C
When I met Aaron, he was 10 years old and living with his parents who had adopted him after three failed placements. Aaron’s parents were at a loss about what to do with him. They were committed, loving parents who wanted to help him make better decisions; however, after living with them for over a year, Aaron continued to have bizarre behaviors that they did not understand. In addition to continuing to steal from his parents any time he had the opportunity, his parents had just figured out that he had also been urinating into the vents in his room. Aaron’s parents were at a loss as to how to help him change this behavior and they were terrified that it would continue to get worse.
Children who have experienced trauma can seem to continually engage in activities that can be baffling to parents. I have had many a parent come in to my practice and describe a foster or adopted child who seems to seek attention in negative ways and to actually work to recreate the circumstances that were traumatizing to them in the first place. From rooms that seem to get instantly messy immediately after cleaning them, to repetitive behaviors that pluck even the calmest parent’s nerves, these children can seem intent on turning their parents into a recreation of the child’s biological parent or earliest caregiver. There is a name for this phenomenon. It is called “traumatic reenactment.” The best way to explain traumatic reenactment is to first understand how trauma works, and the ways we store it in the brain.
Think of your brain as a computer. The files in your computer are stored in different areas. There is a short term memory file that stores what you had for breakfast today and yesterday. There is a long term memory file that stores the stories from your childhood. There is the work file, the running “to do” list file, and many, many more. Days that go as planned are pretty easy to file away.
But what happens on a day when something traumatic happens? An easy definition of trauma is anything that impacts you in such a way that it causes you to feel as though your life is in serious danger, with the possibility of death, or that changes who you perceive yourself to be in a negative way. To show how people typically store traumatic memories, let’s take the example of a car accident. You do not wake up in the morning thinking this is probably going to be the day you are in a car accident. If you really believed that, you would probably never get into the car. But, there you are, driving down the road and someone sideswipes the car you are in. No one is hurt, but there are a few moments of panic and your car is seriously damaged. What do you do? Well, of course, as an adult you make sure everyone in both cars is okay, call 911 to make sure no one is hurt, and then the insurance. But what is happening with your memory filing system? How are you filing this memory? It sure does not go in the breakfast file!
What happens with trauma is that, until we file it, it acts like a virus on our computers. If you have ever had a virus on your computer, you know what happens. You go to get on the internet and think you are checking your email, only to find all kinds of unwanted images popping up on your computer. Then, if and when you are able to get to your email, you may find out you sent a bunch of messages to people that were not even from you! You never sent that! This is how trauma works. Until you file that traumatic memory you just got from the car accident, your brain is going to be working overtime to file it. You will go to get in the car and up will pop the memory of the accident and maybe another accident you had a while back. You will start to remember those terrifying moments when you were out of control and you did not know if you were going to live or die.
Healthy adults file traumatic memories as they verbally process the trauma. Remember how you called the police? You had to tell them what happened so they knew who to send. You were processing the memory. Remember when you had to call the insurance? Same thing. Did you sit in your car for a moment and do some sort of self-soothing like deep breathing to calm yourself down? Maybe you got a hug or reassurance from someone. Perhaps you reminded yourself that you have been in cars thousands of times and the vast majority of those times nothing bad happened.
If you did any of those things, you were processing and filing your memory. Another part of filing trauma is finding a way to understand the event. This includes thinking about whether you could have done something differently, how you got through it, and how you can avoid the same thing happening again. Therapists call that mastering the situation.
Now, think about the child you have or have had in your home who has experienced trauma but did not have anyone to process it with and did not have anyone to soothe them, nor did they know how to self soothe, after all, who would they have learned soothing from? The clinical term for the way this “virus” manifests is “traumatic reenactment.” It goes like this. A trauma occurs. It is not filed appropriately because there is either no, or not enough, processing or soothing for the child. The child tries to gain mastery (understanding) of the trauma by subconsciously putting themselves back into the same situation over and over again in an attempt to understand or “master” it.
Remember Aaron? When Aaron lived with his birth parents he was repeatedly locked in his room for days at a time when his parents went on drug binges. When his adoptive parents brought him in to see me he was lying and stealing constantly, then, they had recently discovered that when they sent him to his room for punishment, he had been urinating into the vents of their home. What became clear was that this child had found a way to experience a traumatic reenactment with his adoptive parents. He lied and stole, then got sent to his room for punishment. While in his room, he had the emotional experience of feeling trapped again, just as he was trapped when he was very young. In his mind, being sent to his room meant he was not allowed to come out even to go to the bathroom. When he had to go, he did what he had before, went in the vents, so he did not have to be around a wet spot in his room. His loving parents had responded in every way they could think of to change these behaviors, but it was not until they understood where the behaviors were coming from that they were able to adapt their responses to more accurately fix the underlying problems.
In therapy, Aaron processed the trauma, learned how to soothe himself and to be soothed by his parents. It really did not take long for the vents to become dry again so his parents could focus on new ways to address other issues related to his early abuse and neglect. For traumatized children, I strongly recommend counseling, with a therapist that specializes in trauma, as a resource to help them process traumatic memories to improve behaviors and help parents find a way to adapt parenting styles in ways that are most beneficial to the child.
Related articles
- Ways To Help Your Child Deal With Trauma (casapalmera.com)
- How to Know if You or Your Child Need a Therapist (help4yourfamily.com)
- The Spectrum of Attachment (help4yourfamily.com)
- Finding a Therapist for a Traumatized and/or Attachment Disordered Child (help4yourfamily.com)
Chronological Age vs. Developmental Age
written by Kate Oliver, LCSW-C
Having a blog on WordPress is so nice in that I got a nice little report for the end of 2012 letting me know which of my posts has gotten the most attention, etc. By far the most popular post was this one! So, in the spirit of sharing and refreshing for the New Year, I thought I would update and repost this blog, since it was one of my earlier ones and may have been missed by some of the folks who are newer to my blog. I keep my comments open and would love to hear if people are getting what they are looking for from this post even if it has been a while since I originally posted. Enjoy!
Chronological age vs. Developmental Age
When figuring out how to best meet the needs of our children, it is important to understand their developmental age. For many children this can be the same age as the chronological age, the age we typically think of when we talk about our children, however, if you have a child that, among other possibilities:
- has a history of trauma or neglect,
- was adopted at an older age (18 months or more),
- has a developmental disability,
- has experienced the death or loss of a primary caregiver,
- has experienced a major change in family structure,
- or has a parent with a serious illness or addiction,
you may have a child that has a “stuck” part of their development. If you have a child like this, typically you might notice that there are times when he or she acts much younger than you would expect for their chronological age. What makes this confusing is that your child may be able to do things that are appropriate for their chronological age. For example, you may have a child that works at or even above grade level in reading and/or math, but in some emotional areas they may be developmentally younger than their chronological age.
Let’s look at an example everyone can relate to, think for a moment about a time when you have been triggered into a younger developmental age, say, when you go to your parent’s house for the weekend. Even as an adult, you may find that you act differently toward them or your siblings than you would in your day-to-day life. You may feel younger, angrier, more docile or more or less confrontational. What that signifies is that there is a part of you that has not left or resolved some of the struggles from your own childhood. Most of us have something like this. Our children are no different.
Some important questions about an area where your child seems stuck in a younger developmental age are:
1. Is my child capable of meeting the demands of this developmental stage? Developmental delays, learning issues, issues related to physical abilities and early childhood exposure can all add to a child’s difficulty in meeting a developmental milestone.
2. Has my child ever been properly taught how to meet this developmental milestone? For example, if you have a daughter you adopted from foster care at age 5, she may not ever have been properly potty trained and taught to clean herself appropriately after using the bathroom. It may be that while we expect that to be a skill children learn between ages two and four, your daughter may require instruction now, as she has not received it before.
3. Did something prevent my child from being able to learn this skill at the appropriate time? Perhaps you had a child with medical issues, a traumatic situation or something else. At the time when other children were learning to make friends and play nicely with other children, your child was busy managing an internal or external stressor that demanded all of their attention they would otherwise have been able to focus on meeting a developmental milestone.
4. Does your child have a traumatic trigger that remains unresolved which prevents them from moving through a developmental stage? I see children who have experienced trauma. Many of them have memories associated with trauma that prevent them from focusing on a task. Children (and adults) with unresolved trauma have what we call triggers, which remind them of the traumatic incident. Depending on what happened, a trigger could be a bathroom, a car, candy, really anything that reminds them of the trauma. What this means for parents with children who have experienced trauma is that the simple act of making a snack for your child could result in a child acting much younger until the traumatic triggers have been identified and resolved so that the apple you cut is just an apple again, instead of a reminder of a difficult past.
Why is it important to know where your child might have a developmental lag or stuck place? Knowing that there are areas where your child is developmentally behind their chronological age allows you to make decisions about how to handle their behavior appropriately.
What to do about a child acting developmentally younger:
After considering the reasons behind the developmental delay, it is easier to figure out how to address the issue. Sometimes it may just be a matter of time, or finding appropriate school or therapeutic support to allow a child’s brain to develop. For children who are delayed due to an external factor, in addition to school and therapeutic support, consider attempting to change your response to match their emotional/developmental age for the issue you are addressing. What would you do for a two-year old who needs to brush her teeth? Would you tell her to go brush her teeth and expect that she was going to easily and happy get right over to the toothbrush and begin throughly cleaning her teeth after applying just the right amount of toothpaste to the toothbrush? Of course not! Ideally, you would go with them (even if they are grumbling), you might remind them of why tooth-brushing is so important (if you have a child adopted at an older age, please remember it may be that no one ever taught them the importance), you would make brushing fun by singing a silly song to say how long you need to brush your teeth.
I know many parents reading this might be saying that your 12-year-old, who acts like a 2-year-old at brushing time is not going to stand for you hovering over her while she is brushing her teeth, and you are not going to talk to her like you would talk to a two-year old. You are right, I am not recommending that you use the tone you would for a two-year old because you might get the death stare or worse, escalate a tense situation. No, I am saying to use what you would do with a two-year old as a guideline for figuring out something with your child that is developmentally two during tooth-brushing time but is residing in a 12-year-old body. To me that would look something like, playfully having a contest to see who can get just the right amount of toothpaste on the toothbrush or offering to get your child started by putting the toothpaste on the toothbrush, then saying a silly poem or singing a silly 12-year-old song, or reading a page out of a joke book to your child while they brush their teeth so they can get an idea of how long to brush. Only read or sing when they are brushing, stop if they stop and start when they start again, and stay playful. Yes, they may look at you like you are crazy, but are they brushing while they are doing it?
Yes, I can hear protesting parents, now saying that you do not want to put toothpaste on your 12 year old’s toothbrush because they are old enough to do it themselves! I know they are chronologically old enough, however, we are talking about something that they experience at a developmentally younger age. And, here’s the good news, if you speak to your child’s developmental age for a while, their needs for that developmental stage get met, and they move on to the next stage of development for that issue.
For more parenting tips that don’t take a ton of time but do improve the happiness level in your home please see my previous posts:
Related articles
- PLACE Parenting for Children with Attachment Disturbance (help4yourfamily.com)
- Parent Affirmation Monday- Curious (help4yourfamily.com)
- Parent Affirmation Monday- Playful (help4yourfamily.com)
- Tips for Gift Giving and the Child with a History of Abuse (help4yourfamily.com)
About me
Kate Oliver, LCSW-C (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) has been a clinician working with traumatized and attachment-disturbed children for almost two decades. She is co-owner of A Healing Place, a private practice in Columbia, Maryland, since 2007.
At the beginning of her career, Kate found that while some children responded to traditional child therapy practices, there were a significant number of children who showed little or no improvement in their overall emotional well-being. This led her to seek out specialized training to learn more about attachment, the bond between parents and children, and found that by using attachment-based strategies in addition to treating trauma, even the most challenging children and their parents, saw major, life-changing shifts, not only for the children she was working with, but the parents as well.
Early in her career, Kate was privileged to work as the clinical director for Tamar’s Children, a program that took pregnant, incarcerated women from prison to a treatment facility that worked on teaching the women to bond with and attach to their babies, while also helping the women to heal their own broken attachments, and history of trauma and addiction. This program was internationally recognized for having a successful, evidence-based practice using an attachment-based model. From working with some of the most severely disenfranchised parents, Kate received important information about how to help all parents maintain a happy, healthy relationship with their children.
In 2007, Kate co-founded A Healing Place, a mental health private group practice in Columbia, Maryland, where she focuses on working with families with children who have a history of trauma and/or attachment disturbances. A board certified supervisor, Kate has been an invited presenter to teach continuing education courses for other social workers and psychologists. In her courses, Kate teaches attachment-building techniques and presents about her sub-specialty, working with families headed by gay and lesbian parents. Kate has also worked as a trainer for Building Families for Children, a therapeutic foster care agency.
Kate is a former board member for the organization COLAGE, a non-profit group that works toward community building for people with gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgender parents. She is currently a member of Attachment Disorders Maryland, a group that works to educate parents and professionals about working with children with attachment related issues. She is a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) Practitioner and Educator.
Kate lives in Columbia, Maryland is the mother of two amazing daughters, the partner to a fantastic husband, and the daughter of one mother and two gay dads. She loves to read any book that crosses her path, write (of course), and she recently started dancing again, a passion she has had since her youth.
Kate can be reached by email: helpforyourfamily@gmail.com for questions or you can find her on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/Help4yourfamily.
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