Reparenting the Child Who Hurts

A Guide to Healing Developmental Trauma and Attachments

Christine Gordon, Caroline Archer

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857005687
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dello sviluppo

Finally, a parenting book which demystifies the latest thinking on neurobiology, physiology and trauma and explains what the research means for the everyday life of parents of children who hurt.

As experts on adoption and fostering who are adoptive parents themselves, Caroline Archer and Christine Gordon explain how this knowledge can help parents to better understand and care for their child. They explain why conventional parenting techniques are often not helpful for the child who has experienced early trauma and explore why therapeuticreparentingis the only way to help repair the unhealthy neurobiological and behavioural patterns which affect the child's development. They do not shy away from how difficult reparenting is, acknowledging how hard it can be to recognise our own fallibility as parents and to change our own parenting patterns. The authors also offer hard-won advice on a range of common parenting flashpoints - from defusing arguments and aggression to negotiating bedtimes and breaks in routine, and making sure that special occasions are remembered for all the right reasons.

Reparenting the Child Who Hurtsis a humane, no-nonsense survival guide for any parent caring for a child with developmental trauma or attachment difficulties, and will also provide information and insights for social workers, teachers, counsellors and other professionals involved in supporting adoptive and foster families.

Part 1

Stepping
Forward

Exploring the Foundations

Introduction

When we first met in the late 1980s and began work with colleagues at Adoption UK (then Parent to Parent Information on Adoption Services (PPIAS)) to explore how parenting ‘hurt’ children (Keck and Kupecky 2002) differed from parenting securely attached children, little did we know that, two decades on, we would still be working together exploring the needs of traumatised children and discussing how best to parent them. Little, too, did we know the extent to which new developments in neurobiology would increase our understanding of the continuing day-to-day struggles that affect the lives of many traumatised children even when they have been removed from their traumatic circumstances and offered the security of loving families.

When we first started writing together in the late 1980s a climate change in the way adoptive family life was perceived was beginning. John Bowlby’s research on attachment (1969, 1973, 1988) was increasingly recognised as pertinent to our understanding of how our earliest relationships, particularly those with our mothers, crucially determine how we relate to the world and our relationships within it. This eventually led to greater awareness amongst the ‘adoption community’ that early trauma continues to have an adverse impact long after children are placed in loving families. This began a movement away from blaming adoptive parents for the ongoing difficulties their children presented to an understanding that on its own love does not conquer all.

This climate of change had its drawbacks. With the label of ‘Reactive Attachment Disorder’ (RAD) that many traumatised children were then given came the implication that the behavioural and relationship difficulties central to this diagnosis were virtually impossible to alter, in effect consigning children to a lifetime of difficulties and failed relationships. Also implicit was the belief that traumatised children’s behaviour was, to a significant degree, under their personal control and that, if parents wished to make family life more tolerable, they needed to wrest control from their children and take it into their own hands. Although it was accepted this should be done in loving and empathetic ways, the message that children ‘wouldn’t do’ rather than ‘couldn’t do’ predominated. This thinking influenced early attempts to create alternative parenting approaches for ‘hurt children’.

Our first output therefore concentrated on control issues and on strategies for confronting and containing specific behavioural issues. Little attention was paid to the underlying feelings that drove ‘hurt’ children’s behaviour.

By the time Caroline wrote First Steps in Parenting the Child Who Hurts: Tiddlers and Toddlers and Next Steps in Parenting the Child Who Hurts: Tykes and Teens (1999a, 1999b) our awareness of the impact on children of early traumatic experiences had moved on considerably. Developments in neuroanatomy (structure) and neurophysiology (function) had increased our understanding that children ‘can’t do’ rather than ‘won’t do’ and that ‘horse whispering’ was preferable to ‘horse breaking’. Hence we were able to recognise that control-based strategies alone would not substantially affect ‘hurt’ (traumatised) children’s ways of understanding and relating to the world. First Steps and Next Steps emphasised a change in parental mind-set, with strategies reflecting the change of emphasis from containment to understanding and healing.

Whilst these two books continue to be very relevant today, particularly the developmental focus on babies and young children in First Steps in Parenting the Child Who Hurts, research and understanding in this exciting field have continued to grow apace, increasing our awareness of the impact of early trauma on every aspect of our children’s being: their body, feelings and thoughts and their expression through their behavioural ‘language’. The study of mirror neurons (MN) exemplifies how neurobiological findings can confirm what previously we could only surmise: that experiences and patterns of interaction learned in the womb and early months of life can profoundly influence our daily lives throughout childhood and adulthood. This book builds on our journey of exploration in First Steps and Next Steps to integrate recent scientific, psychological and social scientific developments and to provide parents, caregivers and professionals with the latest insights into the nature of early relational trauma and its impacts on children at the neurobiological as well as behavioural level.

MIRROR NEURONS

Towards the turn of the century, neuroscientists identified nerve cells in specific areas of monkeys’ brains that were seen to fire, as if the animals were carrying out those actions themselves, when they simply observed other monkeys’ actions (e.g. Rizzolatti, Fogassi and Gallese 1997). This suggests that the firing of neural circuits in these premotor areas plays a vital role in the acquisition of new skills or, conversely, that imitation facilitates the development of mirror neuron (MN) systems (Nishitani and Hari 2000).

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI), Iacoboni and his colleagues (2005) observed that in humans neural firing occurred in areas of the right inferior frontal cortex in response to perceived intentional actions, specifically to encode ‘the “why” of the action and respond differently to different intentions’. The sound associated with an action was also shown to evoke firing in these premotor areas (Kohler et al. 2002). These findings shed important light on the development of communication and social interaction in animals that form close social communities, including humans.

Since gesture and facial imitation are observable in two-day-old human infants (Meltzoy and Moore 1989) this area of functioning must have high survival value. A popular evolutionary view is that hand gestures provided an important means of communication between members of a social group (Roth 2012). For example, during hunting activities, gesture facilitates communication, allowing co-ordination of activities and improving survival chances. With time, specific vocalisations in primates enhanced this process; in humans the gradual development of language, in these same neo-cortical areas, conferred greater survival value.

In Chapter 7, ‘Seeing Eye to Eye’, we consider the hugely important part eye-to-eye contact and ‘mirroring’ play in young children’s development. Baron-Cohen (1999) identifies ‘shared attention’, the capacity to draw other people’s attention to an object and to ‘know that they know I am looking at this’ as significant to social communication. This in turn plays a vital part in the communication of intention at close quarters. Similarly, eyes are often used to establish the ‘pecking order’ in a social group, with weaker individuals lowering their eyes as part of a submissive posture. This has species survival value, where intentionality, such as in ‘battles for dominance’, can occur ‘symbolically’ through eye-to-eye communication, rather than through ‘fight to the death’. Thus the firing and wiring of MN circuits allow us to ‘read’ others’ minds, enhancing the security, trust, flexibility, adaptability and stability that lie at the core of wellbeing.

Children who experienced early maltreatment tend to ‘misread’ situations (d’Andrea et al. 2012). Since in their early lives they experienced others’ actions, such as being looked at, addressed or approached, as frightening or as having painful consequences, their MN circuits are ‘hot-wired’ to ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses. Their ‘survival MN wiring’ means they frequently display inappropriate responses, often perceiving actions as threatening in ‘neutral’ situations, or when others’ intentions are, in fact, well meaning.

The understanding offered by neurobiology also presents us with exciting opportunities to help children repair from early trauma. Allan Schore (1994, 2001a, b) and colleagues worldwide refer to the ‘plasticity’ of the brain, implying that children can alter the ways they respond both neurobiologically and behaviourally if provided with consistent experiences of an alternative, healing environment. In our subsequent book, entitled New Families, Old Scripts: A Guide to the Language of Trauma and Attachment in Adoptive Families (2006) we explored this phenomenon, offering parents focused discussions of how, as the ‘prime agents for change’ for their children, they could create a family environment where change became a real possibility.

In this new book, we look towards integrating the body and the emotionally based nature of traumatic experiences, from the ‘bottom storey’ brainstem and limbic ‘middle storey’, to the neo-cortical (top storey) cognitive functions of our thinking brains. This enables us to formulate important basic principles for developmental reparenting from which parents can tailor-make their approach to their children’s real needs. We start where parents and professionals need to start: at the beginning of children’s physical, emotional, social, behavioural and cognitive development. This is the ‘bottom up’ thinking that informs this volume: starting with ways of sensing, moving on through ways of feeling and doing, and ending with ways of thinking and being. We demonstrate how these are integrally connected and how they make up who and what we become.

In doing so we continue to develop the ideas and suggestions featured in New Families, Old Scripts, and explore the basic principles of caregiving that create an environment where real change becomes a reality for some of our most vulnerable children. The terms ‘therapeutic’, or ‘developmental reparenting’ imply that adopters and foster carers offer the best ‘therapeutic medium’ within which maltreated children can feel sufficiently safe and ‘held’ to set out on the road to healing. Using this awareness we can make the changes in parenting mind-set that our children require so that they, too, can change: in their bodies, their feelings and their thoughts and behaviours. Change then becomes not so much a challenge as a gift: to ourselves, our children and our communities.

Traumatic early experiences are not confined to those children who are, or were, overtly maltreated or spent long periods in the ‘looked after system’. Children born into families where there is persistent parental discord experience uncertainty and fear that ‘prime’ their perceptions and responses. It is often difficult for birth parents to be fully ‘there’ for their children when facing the fear of domestic violence, or to acknowledge that their children see, hear, feel and store these events in their bodies, brains and minds. If these experiences occurred in their earliest months of life when neurobiological development is at its most rapid, children develop trauma-based responses that profoundly shape their lives over the long term. Other children face even more ‘invisible’ adverse early experiences pre- or post-natally. Infants who spend periods in special care baby units experience traumatic early separations that mirror those of fostered and adopted youngsters. Young children who undergo painful hospital procedures experience hurts as inexplicable to them as the pain of abuse, often accompanied by distressing periods of separation they cannot comprehend. Maternal distress and depression create the same feelings of abandonment and unpredictability in young children as neglect. Even if these youngsters are lucky enough to remain with caring birth families they remain prone to trauma-based stress responses that affect their attachment security, relationships and development.

Our book is therefore designed to help all parents of children presenting behavioural and relationship difficulties derived from sub-optimal early life experiences. One of the bedrocks of our approach is the belief that healthy attachments are fundamental to healthy development. All of us are impacted by the way we were parented and almost everyone experiences some degree of attachment-stress (trauma) during their journey to adulthood. Securely attached adults will, as a rule, raise securely attached children, who in their turn will raise securely attached offspring. Theoretically they are well placed to help traumatised children develop healthier attachments. However, securely attached parents may well have differing expectations of the parent–child relationship from those of their traumatised children. Such ‘mis-matches’ need to be acknowledged so that caregivers can make sense of their children’s responses and best meet their needs. Other caregivers may have had difficult childhood experiences that affect their parenting style. Whilst it is more challenging to parent children in healthy ways when our own attachment experiences have been sub-optimal, such adversity can allow us a clearer ‘window’ into our children’s inner world than is available to our more securely attached counterparts.

Whatever our parenting style, it is essential to be able to reflect on our own attachment experiences and those of our children and to have faith that, given the plasticity of the brain, change is always possible. Therefore to become therapeutic parents we need to consider our attachment style and how well this ‘fits’ our children’s trauma and attachment histories. Understanding the neurobiological influences on ourselves and our parenting, alongside those of our children, is vital if we are to adapt to meet our children’s needs effectively. We believe this book provides the foundations that will make change and ‘rebuilding’ more possible in our families and make our journey through life more comfortable and rewarding.

Chapter 1

Knitting Your Kid!

Patterns of Knitting and Nurturing Attachments

Although making an analogy between raising children and knitting woollies might seem fanciful it can be a useful tool in developing our understanding of the impact of trauma on children’s attachment, resilience and global development. So let’s begin at the beginning and see where we go!

Raw wool from the fleece comprises matted strands of dirty, oily fibre. To produce the balls of wool to create complete garments we need to strip, wash, tease out, card and spin the disconnected, tangled threads into longer, more even, inter-linked strands. This represents, metaphorically, the sequence of frenetic division, determining of potential function, and building of vital connections between the myriad cells that define the individual, taking form within the womb. The process of wool creation must be undertaken with great care and follow the correct production sequence. Then, irrespective of colour, texture or minor individual variation, we have the makings of a fine garment: as long as we have enough material, time and skill to follow the appropriate pattern, using suitable knitting needles. The same principle holds for the creation of human beings.

At birth babies possess more than a lifetime’s worth of brain cells, neurons that must become specialised and inter-connected to create a mature, feeling and thinking human being. Normally at birth the ‘raw wool’ (fertilised embryo) has been spun into an identifiable ‘fluffy ball’ (new-born baby) with the potential to influence, for example, colour, size and strength. These characteristics, drawn from the gene templates of both parents, are tempered by experiences in the womb, creating the unique pattern for development of each human being. Within this early environment (metaphorically represented by the washing, carding, spinning and refining process) many unseen, poorly understood and underplayed influences can have a defining impact.

Provided there are reasonably adequate envir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D.
• Part 1  Stepping Forward: Exploring the Foundations
• Part 2  What Can We Do?
• Appendix 1: Posters to Print
• Appendix 2: Check In and Check Out Outline
• Glossary
• References
• Selection of Useful Books for Children
• Essential Resources