The Science of Parenting Adopted Children: A Brain-Based, Trauma-Informed Approach to Cultivating Your Child’s Social, Emotional and Moral Development
Today’s adoptees — infants to adolescents — arrive in their forever family with much capacity to recover from the early trauma that most often put them on the path to adoption. This book offers parents a comprehensive approach, ready to tap into, to bring about the healing of their son or daughter, or in the case of relative placements, their nephew, cousin, or grandchild. The content is applicable to domestic and international adoptees. The focus of this book is cultivating the well-being of the child who’s joined the family via adoption.
Parents want their children to know the joy of relationships and learning. The tips in this book are designed to advance the social, emotional, moral, and cognitive skills children need to be successful at home, in school and in the community. The subject matter also includes an overlay of information coming from the field of neuroscience. Brain development is impacted by one’s early environment. Yet, the brain too, can learn new ways to function.
Children proceed through stages of development within the context of nurturing relationships with parents. For example, learning to talk is a progression that starts with smiling, babbling, and cooing. When the course of growth is interrupted by unfortunate experiences like prenatal substance exposure, maternal depression or stress, abandonment, neglect, deprivation of an orphanage setting, sexual or physical abuse, moving from one foster home or orphanage to another — skills that should emerge are thwarted. The boy or girl with an early trauma history is kept “immature.” So, moms and dads adopting a son or daughter must also adopt a new style of parenting. The approach must guide the child through trauma recovery.
The book is laid out in chapters alternating content with corresponding parenting tips. We’ll start with a definition of complex trauma, and we’ll take a broad look at how various traumatic experiences weaken the child’s developmental foundation. We’ll move to chapters each with in-depth focus about a specific aspect of child development like creating attachments, being able to cope, having emotional well-being and learning to laugh and play. These slices of content explain how trauma has impacted the growth of skills in this area. The “tips” show the way to rebuild the skills. Combined, the strategies make a powerful tool box to developmentally renovate — to “grow up” — your adopted son or daughter.
The principal audience of this book is parents. Arleta vews parents as the primary healing resource. Moms and Dads know their son or daughter best. The content is certainly suitable for professionals who have contact with children with early trauma — mental health professionals, child welfare workers, early-intervention therapists, occupational, speech and physical therapists, pediatricians, educators, court officers and CASA volunteers. Infants, toddlers, preschoolers, tweens, and teens benefit when we use a trauma-informed lens to design their services and academic learning
Along the way Arleta has conveyed the need to seek help — quickly— even if that means making a drive or catching a flight. If a child has cancer, juvenile diabetes, or cystic fibrosis you wouldn’t “wait to see if he grows out of it.” You wouldn’t say, “love will be enough.” These conditions are treated aggressively. The most informed physicians and the most advanced treatment regimens would be sought. Arleta would like to see us react as assertively to treating trauma. Trauma, left to fester, robs children of living a life in which they can experience the simple day-to-day pleasures that come from interacting with others, and the self-worth that comes with recognizing ones’ own growth and accomplishments. Arleta has also worked to strike a balance between portraying trauma’s unsympathetic wrath with that of optimism and hope. Parsed in is the value of nurture and humor too. Adoption & Attachment Therapy Partners, LLC has many, many success stories. Several of these cases are highlighted in the vignettes throughout the book. The names have been changed to protect confidentiality. In each of these cases, the adoptee, Mom, Dad, brothers, and sisters invested time and effort. They accepted and applied the guidance offered at Adoption & Attachment Therapy Partners. Today, their families are thriving! Your family can too!
