learning
Developmental issues for young children in foster care
If you follow us on Twitter you will have seen us highlight this article from the American Academy of Pediatrics a week or so ago. It’s called Developmental Issues for Young Children in Foster Care, and while it was published in November 2000, it is as relevant today as it was then.
We’d recommend you read it. Really. If you are a carer, or about to become a carer, read it.
It’s one of the most complete analyses of some of the early development issues faced by children in care in their early years. It’s an academic article, so you’ll find the language, well, academic. Don’t be put off. There are so many relevant points in it we were nodding at nearly every paragraph.
We found much of our foster care training focused on the high level issues you and your foster child will face. It wasn’t until we were in charge of a small person who had so much to make up, that we realised we needed a lot more information on how to accelerate learning and development, if that was indeed possible, and how to deal with the real day to day issues around attachment.
We think this article is so useful that over the next few posts we’re going to highlight some of the key aspects of it. Now we are not child psychologists. But we’ve faced so many of these issues with the Camper, that it’s not academic to us anymore.
Early brain and child development
Let’s paraphrase the article: brain growth and development are most active in the early years of life – that’s when personality traits, learning processes, and coping with stress and emotions are established and then become permanent for children.
For children who have little stimulation, or who deal with child abuse or family violence, this development may either stall or be impaired.
What is needed to let children develop their cognitive (perception, memory, judgment and reasoning), language and socialisation skills is stimulation and nurturing. So as a carer, you might find you need to do more than just attend to the physical needs of this child. While the system has hopefully prevented it happening further, you need to repair.
You may need to take on some serious activity and stimulation. We did. When faced with a child failing to thrive we planned each day to cover many experiences. Among other things we sang, played, ran, hopped, jumped, swam, did kindy gym, talked endlessly and explained everything, played with words, mimicked one another, played with water and sand, played upside down, cuddled animals - both real and soft, chose and cherished special comfort toys, and read stories every single day. There were lots of social experiences too, visits to parks and playgrounds, shopping centres and coffee shops, family and friends’ homes. And there were lots of cuddles, and giggles, and routine.
You need to make sure you talk to all the resources at your disposal – workers, paediatricians, health services and others – to work out what may be needed for your foster child, and in fact what is possible.
But we can tell you we are in awe of what a child is able to achieve. And the more you can invest in them, the better chance they’ll have.
We’d recommend you read it. Really. If you are a carer, or about to become a carer, read it.
It’s one of the most complete analyses of some of the early development issues faced by children in care in their early years. It’s an academic article, so you’ll find the language, well, academic. Don’t be put off. There are so many relevant points in it we were nodding at nearly every paragraph.
We found much of our foster care training focused on the high level issues you and your foster child will face. It wasn’t until we were in charge of a small person who had so much to make up, that we realised we needed a lot more information on how to accelerate learning and development, if that was indeed possible, and how to deal with the real day to day issues around attachment.
We think this article is so useful that over the next few posts we’re going to highlight some of the key aspects of it. Now we are not child psychologists. But we’ve faced so many of these issues with the Camper, that it’s not academic to us anymore.
Early brain and child development
Let’s paraphrase the article: brain growth and development are most active in the early years of life – that’s when personality traits, learning processes, and coping with stress and emotions are established and then become permanent for children.
For children who have little stimulation, or who deal with child abuse or family violence, this development may either stall or be impaired.
What is needed to let children develop their cognitive (perception, memory, judgment and reasoning), language and socialisation skills is stimulation and nurturing. So as a carer, you might find you need to do more than just attend to the physical needs of this child. While the system has hopefully prevented it happening further, you need to repair.
You may need to take on some serious activity and stimulation. We did. When faced with a child failing to thrive we planned each day to cover many experiences. Among other things we sang, played, ran, hopped, jumped, swam, did kindy gym, talked endlessly and explained everything, played with words, mimicked one another, played with water and sand, played upside down, cuddled animals - both real and soft, chose and cherished special comfort toys, and read stories every single day. There were lots of social experiences too, visits to parks and playgrounds, shopping centres and coffee shops, family and friends’ homes. And there were lots of cuddles, and giggles, and routine.
You need to make sure you talk to all the resources at your disposal – workers, paediatricians, health services and others – to work out what may be needed for your foster child, and in fact what is possible.
But we can tell you we are in awe of what a child is able to achieve. And the more you can invest in them, the better chance they’ll have.
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Foster children walking on eggshells
Here is a quote, from a real person, Jennifer, who runs a site called Foster Care in America. Her site gets the thumbs up from us because of its constructive focus, and its positive objectives. Jennifer highlights foster care alumni and their achievements, and has recently started writing about her experiences as a child in care. How’s that for leadership?
So just take a moment, close your eyes, and try to think about what that might feel like. Knowing that the most fundamental element of your life – where you live and who you live with – might change at any moment. No warning. Out of your control. That’s stressful.
Why on earth would you begin to put down any roots? Why would you bother?
Children are learning to live with a level of stress that most of us only deal with as adults. What does that do to them?
As adults, we have lots of resources available to help us cope with stress. We have the ability to research for ourselves. We have support groups, family networks and often employers who care enough to teach us to deal with it or to support us if it becomes overwhelming. And we have life experience to put the stressful event in some sort of context.
Kids have none of that.
The Camper is with us now until she decides otherwise (she has told us that she’s never moving out by the way). She sees her birth family and this knowledge of her history is good. But we’ve seen her deal with stress about her birth family. She has suffered acute stress after contact visits. She suffers stress about what she thinks her birth family expect of her at contact visits. It’s not what the usual under-10 brigade has to deal with, and so we balance two approaches with her: a cheerful sense of robustness about it all (‘oh, you’ll be fine!’), and an acutely tuned awareness of how she really feels. So we are actively addressing the Camper’s stress. If we want her to trust us and have confidence that we can make it right for her, we need to be able to influence it.
Luckily we can. As the Camper works through this it has reinforced for her that:
If moving children causes them such stress, shouldn’t we aim not to move them? Or if we need to move them, shouldn’t we have the guts to make it permanent, at the very least for those early formative years. When there is so much evidence that multiple moves harm children, why do we keep accepting that it is the best we can do?
Imagine if we could get a Prime Minister to say ‘No child should walk on eggshells, knowing that at any moment without warning; HOME CHANGE!’
So just take a moment, close your eyes, and try to think about what that might feel like. Knowing that the most fundamental element of your life – where you live and who you live with – might change at any moment. No warning. Out of your control. That’s stressful.
Why on earth would you begin to put down any roots? Why would you bother?
Children are learning to live with a level of stress that most of us only deal with as adults. What does that do to them?
As adults, we have lots of resources available to help us cope with stress. We have the ability to research for ourselves. We have support groups, family networks and often employers who care enough to teach us to deal with it or to support us if it becomes overwhelming. And we have life experience to put the stressful event in some sort of context.
Kids have none of that.
The Camper is with us now until she decides otherwise (she has told us that she’s never moving out by the way). She sees her birth family and this knowledge of her history is good. But we’ve seen her deal with stress about her birth family. She has suffered acute stress after contact visits. She suffers stress about what she thinks her birth family expect of her at contact visits. It’s not what the usual under-10 brigade has to deal with, and so we balance two approaches with her: a cheerful sense of robustness about it all (‘oh, you’ll be fine!’), and an acutely tuned awareness of how she really feels. So we are actively addressing the Camper’s stress. If we want her to trust us and have confidence that we can make it right for her, we need to be able to influence it.
Luckily we can. As the Camper works through this it has reinforced for her that:
- We are her family, we love her and we will help her work through this.
- We know her best and she can talk to us about it.
- She gets a say, and she can influence the outcome.
If moving children causes them such stress, shouldn’t we aim not to move them? Or if we need to move them, shouldn’t we have the guts to make it permanent, at the very least for those early formative years. When there is so much evidence that multiple moves harm children, why do we keep accepting that it is the best we can do?
Imagine if we could get a Prime Minister to say ‘No child should walk on eggshells, knowing that at any moment without warning; HOME CHANGE!’
Self control, and self interest, for children in care?
An interesting article crossed our desk this week.
It’s from The New Yorker, and it’s about self-control. Or rather, the ability or willingness of some people to delay gratification. The experiment, carried out in the 1960’s at Stanford University, put nursery school children in a room with a treat. The researcher offered that they could eat it straight away, but that if they waited until the researcher came back before eating it, they would get a second treat. A number of children successfully waited, and they used a number of mechanisms to take their focus off the treat sitting before them.
Over time, and with further analysis, the researcher ‘began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teenagers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow’.
We quote: ‘ “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”’
This struck a chord with us. So many stories from children in care highlight how powerless and fearful they felt. So much of a skilled and loving parent’s task should be to teach children how to make situations work for them, to understand the ‘give and take’ or negotiations that they need to undertake for many reasons – safety, happiness, fulfilment, success. And if that kind of care and teaching is missing, how disadvantaged are these children in coping with life?
When Happy Camper came to live with us, self-control was an alien concept. She was completely impulsive, fearful of change and dreadfully upset when any experience she was enjoying ended.
Nowdays, the degree of negotiation that goes on at our house makes us feel a bit like the United Nations. On occasion we have to invoke the ‘just do it’ creed. But after reading this article, we are pleased to see that the Camper is well and truly working out how to make situations work for her. She’s often thinking through all the elements of recognition, reward and gratification and shuffling them around to see what suits her.
We like that sense of robustness and, to be frank, self-interest. There is plenty of time to teach her to put others first (and we have started that journey), but given her background, we’re happy to see her learn to put herself first. She missed that bit. She was too busy just struggling to survive.
So how did we start her on this path? Firstly, we showed her how loving parents nurture their children. We showed her how we could put her first above everything. She learned how it felt to have every need catered for. We hope, and we think, that she’s learned that she deserves it.
Second, even when she was tiny we offered her both a reason to do what we wanted her to do, and an understanding of the consequences. It took time and it took energy, and sometimes it was clearly beyond her understanding and will power. But she began to learn how everything is connected, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that her actions trigger different outcomes.
We’re proud of how far the Camper has come.
It’s from The New Yorker, and it’s about self-control. Or rather, the ability or willingness of some people to delay gratification. The experiment, carried out in the 1960’s at Stanford University, put nursery school children in a room with a treat. The researcher offered that they could eat it straight away, but that if they waited until the researcher came back before eating it, they would get a second treat. A number of children successfully waited, and they used a number of mechanisms to take their focus off the treat sitting before them.
Over time, and with further analysis, the researcher ‘began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teenagers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow’.
We quote: ‘ “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”’
This struck a chord with us. So many stories from children in care highlight how powerless and fearful they felt. So much of a skilled and loving parent’s task should be to teach children how to make situations work for them, to understand the ‘give and take’ or negotiations that they need to undertake for many reasons – safety, happiness, fulfilment, success. And if that kind of care and teaching is missing, how disadvantaged are these children in coping with life?
When Happy Camper came to live with us, self-control was an alien concept. She was completely impulsive, fearful of change and dreadfully upset when any experience she was enjoying ended.
Nowdays, the degree of negotiation that goes on at our house makes us feel a bit like the United Nations. On occasion we have to invoke the ‘just do it’ creed. But after reading this article, we are pleased to see that the Camper is well and truly working out how to make situations work for her. She’s often thinking through all the elements of recognition, reward and gratification and shuffling them around to see what suits her.
We like that sense of robustness and, to be frank, self-interest. There is plenty of time to teach her to put others first (and we have started that journey), but given her background, we’re happy to see her learn to put herself first. She missed that bit. She was too busy just struggling to survive.
So how did we start her on this path? Firstly, we showed her how loving parents nurture their children. We showed her how we could put her first above everything. She learned how it felt to have every need catered for. We hope, and we think, that she’s learned that she deserves it.
Second, even when she was tiny we offered her both a reason to do what we wanted her to do, and an understanding of the consequences. It took time and it took energy, and sometimes it was clearly beyond her understanding and will power. But she began to learn how everything is connected, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and that her actions trigger different outcomes.
We’re proud of how far the Camper has come.
Teaching a child to make a decision
We don’t presume to tell anyone how to make decisions, although there’s plenty of room in the business world for more practice.
We talked in our last post about teaching the Camper to have an opinion, and how having an opinion is pretty fundamental to making a decision.
We’re good at decisions. We’ve had lots of practice, and we are never short of an opinion on anything, funnily enough. But our willingness to take the lead was a source of tension with the private agency. We kept tripping over ‘the line’ drawn by the ‘experts’, and they weren’t giving up territory to anyone. You could argue that they thought they were doing their job. But we think they needed to learn the lesson we’ve just taught the Camper.
We recently gave the Camper real life experience at making a decision. It was in relation to an event that happens every single day of her life. Her approach was to see how she felt just before the event each day, and we had to adjust our responses to accommodate her.
Now we can tell you that even though the event itself was minor and mundane, the Camper’s capriciousness about it began to take its toll. And if we pushed on through and thwarted her - that is, we made the decision for her - we’d get one of the meltdowns that parents can only shudder at.
‘She wanted routine’ you might mutter. You’re right, she did. But she’s a forthright little character and just imposing a routine on her wasn’t working. We tried that.
So we taught her to make the decision.
We explained why it was important to us and the workings of the family that mundane, routine things ran smoothly.
We explained why it was important to her growth and capability.
We explained how important cooperation was in our family.
We explained clearly what we wanted from her.
We told her she needed to make a decision about what she was going to do each day.
We discussed her options with her.
We gave her a weekend to think and talk about it, before making her final choice.
We explained that her final choice would be it for a set period of time.
And just to make sure the point got across, we chose an extra-curricular activity, described how she relied on our cooperation to get her there, and explained that her willingness to cooperate each day would directly influence our cooperation. We didn’t threaten to stop the activity completely, but the risk for her was constant interruptions to it.
Bingo. While the preparation took a week or so, behaviour changed overnight. No kidding. And it’s stuck.
What’s happened of course is that the activity has become a habit. The Camper no longer spends any time ‘thinking’ about it, she just does it. We knew that, and Happy Camper has learned it. She’s learned some self-discipline. And we think we’ve started to teach her an important life lesson about expending her energy and emotion on the things that really matter. Gold stars all round.
Oh, and the lesson for the agency workers? If it’s a good placement, focus on the important stuff, and trust us to make some good decisions for the child.
We talked in our last post about teaching the Camper to have an opinion, and how having an opinion is pretty fundamental to making a decision.
We’re good at decisions. We’ve had lots of practice, and we are never short of an opinion on anything, funnily enough. But our willingness to take the lead was a source of tension with the private agency. We kept tripping over ‘the line’ drawn by the ‘experts’, and they weren’t giving up territory to anyone. You could argue that they thought they were doing their job. But we think they needed to learn the lesson we’ve just taught the Camper.
We recently gave the Camper real life experience at making a decision. It was in relation to an event that happens every single day of her life. Her approach was to see how she felt just before the event each day, and we had to adjust our responses to accommodate her.
Now we can tell you that even though the event itself was minor and mundane, the Camper’s capriciousness about it began to take its toll. And if we pushed on through and thwarted her - that is, we made the decision for her - we’d get one of the meltdowns that parents can only shudder at.
‘She wanted routine’ you might mutter. You’re right, she did. But she’s a forthright little character and just imposing a routine on her wasn’t working. We tried that.
So we taught her to make the decision.
We explained why it was important to us and the workings of the family that mundane, routine things ran smoothly.
We explained why it was important to her growth and capability.
We explained how important cooperation was in our family.
We explained clearly what we wanted from her.
We told her she needed to make a decision about what she was going to do each day.
We discussed her options with her.
We gave her a weekend to think and talk about it, before making her final choice.
We explained that her final choice would be it for a set period of time.
And just to make sure the point got across, we chose an extra-curricular activity, described how she relied on our cooperation to get her there, and explained that her willingness to cooperate each day would directly influence our cooperation. We didn’t threaten to stop the activity completely, but the risk for her was constant interruptions to it.
Bingo. While the preparation took a week or so, behaviour changed overnight. No kidding. And it’s stuck.
What’s happened of course is that the activity has become a habit. The Camper no longer spends any time ‘thinking’ about it, she just does it. We knew that, and Happy Camper has learned it. She’s learned some self-discipline. And we think we’ve started to teach her an important life lesson about expending her energy and emotion on the things that really matter. Gold stars all round.
Oh, and the lesson for the agency workers? If it’s a good placement, focus on the important stuff, and trust us to make some good decisions for the child.