Category Archives: attachment challenged

Dear Parent Teacher

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Hello Ce,

I love this. Take a few minutes to listen to the smartest people I’ve heard from in a long time.

Brain Highways

Out of the mouths of our babes.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly, no fee Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month. Next group is November 11th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us. Child care provided.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month. Our next course dates are December 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online at http://www.attachplace.com.

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans. Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

Sexting And Adopted Children

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This morning I was met with giggling and sheepish eye darting when both of my young adult children with questionable prefrontal cortices were telling me about their 17-year-old overnight guest last weekend who shared nothing less than a graphic video of anal sex downloaded from the internet. My kids were intrigued and scandalized at the same time. Both anxiously talked over one another, telling their similar versions of the same story, and how they independently got up and went to their respective rooms as soon as they realized what they were seeing. If this is true (and it seemed so), their mutual response was actually unusual.

I dare say many attachment-challenged children with poor executive function (as well as plenty of securely attached children with developing executive function), depending on age, would also be at once intrigued and scandalized. Also, they may be compelled to engage, watch repeatedly, and share further in the form of acting out what was seen–sexting it out, and possibly getting into serious hot water taking it all too far.

I encourage you to talk with all of your kids starting in 6th grade about texting rules and family expectations. While you are at it, share the law and legal consequences of sexting. Twenty percent of middle-schoolers with cell phones have received sexts. If your third grader happens to have access to one, then beware. This sexting abuse is happening at younger and younger ages all the time.

When my daughter was 14-years-old, she borrowed my cell phone for a quick call to a friend that lasted only five or so minutes. Later in the evening, from that school friend, I received a follow-up sext of his erect penis, up close and way too naked. I have no idea what she sent possibly prompting his sext, and it didn’t matter. She was 14, and he was 18. He committed a crime. The rest is history.

If your child is exhibiting poor judgment in other areas, you can assume the cell phone will be no exception. Set boundaries and keep them. It is okay for safety purposes to invade the privacy of a minor. No child NEEDS a cell phone. Every child NEEDS protection from him/herself when continually behaving unreliably and irresponsibly.

Sometimes we have to lend our brain power to our children while theirs is still under functioning. That may go on throughout the teen years well into young adulthood.

Breathe, dear parents, and carry on.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly, no fee Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month. Next group is November 11th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month. Our next course dates are December 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online at http://www.attachplace.com.

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans. Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

Raising kids in the age of technology–yikes.

…And Justice For All–Restorative Justice Best for Adoptive Children

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I know you all are doubtful that it is possible to raise attachment challenged, traumatized children without punishing them for their poor behavior. The real challenge is resisting the parental urge to punish. What you can do instead is get extremely good at restorative justice.

For your child, restorative justice is labor intensive, pocket-book painful, and shame free. It is just this simple. If you break it or steal it, you pay for it from your own resources–allowance, birthday money, savings, holiday money, earned income. If you waste my time, you owe me. No money? No problem. Pay your debt by dusting baseboards, pulling weeds, cleaning out the gutters, sweeping the patio, skimming the pool, walking the dog…there are a zillion ways to pay off the repair of damage done or time spent repairing, waiting, searching, taxi-ing, etc.

The world works according to the principles of restorative justice. If you park too long, you pay a price. If you back into another car, you pay to fix it. If you put a hole in the wall, you repair it after shopping and paying for spackle. If you do not show up to a therapy appointment, you have to pay anyway. If you do not show up for work, you are fired and do not collect a paycheck. Restorative justice is educational and excellent training for the future.

Those are the kinds of consequences that make sense, restore justice, require responsible action, and have zero emotional expenditures if you can manage to regulate.

I can kind of hear a cry from many of you parents: What if they won’t do it? If they won’t, then they don’t get the next thing they want until they do restore justice. It’s a kind of barless jail. When bail is paid, life goes back to normal. Just like in real life. This can be your child’s real life. Give it a shot and stop punishing poor behavior. Punishment teaches nothing positive. Restorative justice teaches fairness.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly, no fee Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month. Next group is November 11th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month. Our next course dates are December 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online at http://www.attachplace.com.

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans. Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.

…and justice for all.

When You Come To The Edge Of All That You Know

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Listen folks, our kids do not come with handbooks, for the attached ones or otherwise, so you are in for the ride of your life. Buckle up. It’s bumpy out here in parentland.

When you come to the edge of all that you know, jump. And, I don’t mean over the cliff. I mean jump into the kind of parenting that is not what you were raised with; the kind that scares you; the kind that has to face the fact that you are not, never have been, and never will be in control of your children.

Your child is on a path s/he is trying to figure out, too. Your parenting job is to help him find a middle ground: the path between cannon-balling into the deep end without a life preserver and diving head-long into the shallow end. Neither is a good choice for your attachment challenged, traumatized child. The middle way is the only way with hope for a better life. If you are having trouble figuring out what the middle way is, let me help. It’s for your child to have enough family time to learn how to swim.

So, what is that scary, non-controlling, love-based form of parenting that can support your child into the middle way of a productive life? It’s called non-traditional, therapeutic parenting that focuses on relationship over compliance, and love over fear.

Traditional parenting is full of cause and effect, logical consequences that make so much sense to attached people who were raised by biological parents. Therapeutic parenting puts logical parenting with imposing consequences away for another day when your traumatized child has a brain that can make sense of that kind of intervention. Traditional parenting registers one way with attachment challenged children–I am bad and my parents are bad. Therapeutic parenting registers a different way–I am safe and my parents are loving. Which model makes the most sense for a child who came into your life believing at the core that s/he is bad because s/he was abandoned and parents are not to be trusted or even worse, dangerous?

If nothing is working to guide your child toward the middle way, you might check your parenting, then jump into something new, something untried, something less power and control oriented. Are you putting compliance in front of everything else that matters–like love, relationship, safety? If so, you are the one who has the brain power to change, not your challenged child. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is, you know, insanity. If you are feeling more and more insane, try 100% therapeutic parenting. Over time, I promise the middle way will seem more and more possible for your child. Swimming happens.

Love Matters,
Ce Eshelman, LMFT

Read about therapeutic parenting in a number of books. Beyond Consequences by Heather Forbes and Bryan Post is a start. There are many others.
The Attach Place Logo The Attach Place provides a monthly, no fee Adoptive Parent Support Group in Sacramento, every 2nd Wednesday of each month. Next group is November 11th at a NEW time–5:30 pm. Join us.

The Attach Place offers an 8-hr. Trust-based Parenting Course every other month. Our next course dates are December 5th and 12th, 2015. Sign-up online at http://www.attachplace.com.

The Attach Place supports The Wounded Warrior Project by providing free neurofeedback to veterans. Feel free to send a soldier our way for an assessment and 20 session course of treatment.

Feel free to send this link to friends or family members who you would like to receive Daily YOU Time: Wisdom for Adoptive Parents.