It is so easy to look at a Child of Trauma and think that difficult behavior occurs because our children hate us or, at very least, don’t care about us.  As a Child of Trauma begins to attach, nothing could be further from the truth.  Our children are desperate to figure out where they belong.  They are terrified of being harmed or abandoned again.  When a child is misbehaving, he or she is telling us something.  The message may be coming in the most infuriating way possible, but a message is being sent. 

So, it becomes essential that we ask:

When children, such as those in Foster care, are not given the chance to have a stable home life and find themselves traumatized physically, sexually, or emotionally they can learn that there is no-one they are able to count on. The world is a place full of threats and adults can't be trusted. A Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) kid puts on emotional armour to ensure that he/she is safe from harm. These children learn to rely on themselves and themselves alone. No one is to be let in and no one is to be trusted.

Anniversaries can be a painful time for fosters and adopted kids and those times are passed onto the caregivers and parents.

These can the be anniversaries of all kinds of events.

• Birthdays
• The day the child was removed from an abusive/neglectful home by social services
• The placement or removal of a child from a foster situation
• Adoption Day
• First day of school
• In short, any event that has significance to a child

When kids are abused or neglected at a young age they will tend to emotionally halt at the age the trauma began. A child won't begin to emotionally grow again until they are in an environment that they feel safe.

This is a challenge. Sometimes our kids will act their age and sometimes they act so much younger. When your seven or eight year old is acting like a four year old, it is really hard to remember that you need to parent them at that level.