Last week I picked up dd6 from kindergarten, accompanied by ds6 and ds7. She happily hugged me, and they all ran to the car.

Predictably, the boys got to the car before her. Predictably, she began screaming because she wanted the middle seat. I empathized with her wanting to get the seat and the frustration of not having what she wanted. She got more upset and refused to get in the car, so I calmly picked her up and put her in the car, where she continued screaming.

As I turned on the ignition, I thought about a topic that often comes to mind – how to deal with children when they become dysregulated. All children become dysregulated at times, but since the twins are very quickly and easily dysregulated, this is something I get to practice a lot.

One Shabbos morning I was at shul and an older woman commented, looking at dd, “What sweetness!” This is someone I had previously discussed the fostering situation with, and I responded, “Yes, there’s a lot of sweetness when all her needs are being met, but when they’re not, it’s not so sweet.”

Five minutes later, dd asked me about having more treats and I told her she had already had her fill. (I talk to the kids beforehand about how much they can have; we always have the same guidelines.) She began crying and jumping up and down in protest. The woman said to me, “Oh, now I see what you mean.” I laughingly (and truthfully) replied, “Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet!”

When I respond to a child who is distressed or dysregulated, I integrate my six foundational principles of Leadership Parenting. I call them the Six Cs: calm, clarity, courage, compassion, connection and correction.

Firstly, slow down inside yourself to feel your calm. You can take a physical or mental deep breath to help with this.

You need to have clarity about what your intentions are in the interaction; when you feel this, it will come across to the child. In this case, I had established the boundaries of how many treats she could have, and I had clarity that this was the boundary I was going to maintain. I could also have chosen to be flexible on this and knowing I was willing to shift my position would have been my clarity.

Once you have clarity about what you want, you need to have courage to see it through. It’s easier in the short run to give in to a child and let them have or do what they want. Being willing to face your child’s displeasure and deal with his resulting acting out requires courage.

Before addressing any issue with a child, it’s important to feel compassionate towards him. If you’re frustrated and irritable, you’re not going to be effective in communicating.

All of this work is done inside of you before you say or do anything with a child. Now that you’re centered in yourself, you step into the active part of the interaction with your child.

When you guide your child, it’s important to first establish a connection. Look your child in the eye (eye level is very helpful for a child who is very out of sorts), and empathize with their frustration or disappointment. “That wafer looks so yummy and you really want to have more.” Wait for a response, and validate that response. “It’s really hard.”

This moves into the final step, correction. “When we come to shul, we have ‘x ‘many treat (establishing or reminding child of boundary). We’re not going to have any more treats now. Would you like to take the wafer home and save it for a different special time?” Or, “Come, hold my hand and we’re going to go outside together.”

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This is a typical scenario. But there are other ways that the steps can play out.

Every week we do an online grocery order and my husband goes on the designated day to pick it up. Sometimes he takes one of the children with him. This week he took two children. A third, upset he wasn’t going to go, spit on my husband and verbally became very expressive about his anger. Dr. Gordon Neufeld would call this being filled with ‘foul frustration’. I was inside the house so my husband carried him in to me and said, “Ds6 needs you.”

Next to where I was sitting were two towers built by one of the other children, one of Duplo and one of magnet tiles. He began taking the tiles off, one by one, and tossing them into the box. I thanked him for putting them away. He looked at me appraisingly, then knocked the entire tower over. He looked at me to see my response. I didn’t say anything, but stayed compassionate in myself for his disappointment. He knocked down the Duplo tower and looked at me daringly. I quietly looked at him.

In this case, without saying a word, I’ve used calm, clarity, courage, compassion and connection. It was clear to me what my boundaries were (clarity), and I was going to see that through (courage). I was calm and compassionate, and he could feel connection with me just from the way I looked at him.

He stood there for another minute and then sat down and began to build with the Duplo. After a minute, he gave me a brick and said, “Cake for you, my sweet mommy.” I thanked him and ‘nibbled’ on it. As he built and built and built, I could feel him getting quiet inside himself, without either of us speaking. He would periodically look up, checking to see that I was looking at him. And that was it. The correction happened as a natural outflow of our interaction.

Helping a child regulate doesn’t always require words. Sometimes words get in the way. It always requires your calm and compassionate presence.

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Soon dd6 came back from the shopping, happily carrying in two small packages of vegetables. Then there was nothing else for her to bring in so she began screaming.
She can switch from happy to upset, and upset to happy, literally on a dime. When she screams, it’s piercing, extended and usually accompanied by jumping up and down or throwing herself on the floor. My teen boys are amazed that a child can scream as much as she does.

By this time it was close to 6 pm. When it’s so late in the day and children are tired, you need to have a lot of patience because they are overextended. This can be a particular challenge because parents are also feeling overextended and tired by this time.

In this case, I brought her close to me and gave her a slow hug. Usually this helps her, but this time she so dysregulated that it hardly registered. If anything, she got more upset. When I hugged her, I felt that her clothing was damp from the splashing outdoors she had done just before they left, and realized she must be cold. I picked her up and took her to her room. I spoke to her minimally because everything was too much for her at that moment, but whatever I said was said in a low and soothing voice. I took off her wet clothes and put her in a snuggly pair of pajamas. This was all accompanied by her piercing screams and flailing around.

Just because you are helping a child and giving them what they need, it doesn’t mean they’re going to instantly calm down or cheer up. Not at all. In this case, dd6 was so overwound that she couldn’t calm down.

She stood in front of me while I finished zipping her up. Since I was sitting on her bed we were eye level, and I said, “Now you’re warm and dry, doesn’t that feel good?” This wasn’t said to elicit a response from her but to help her get recentered. Then I sat with her on my lap for a few minutes. She lay her head against my chest and when I felt her body relaxing, gave her a big hug before we went back to the kitchen to have dinner.

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How do you react when your child is melting down? What is hard for you in the moment that they’re having a hard time?

Avivah

Several weeks ago we had a massive amount of rain in a short time.

When the rain was beginning to come down, the kids wanted to play outside. With the quote “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing” in mind, I offered two of the children matching raincoats and rain pants, and gave the third a good raincoat. There wasn’t any lightning and knowing they had some rain protection, I was glad to let them enjoy what quickly turned into a downpour.

They all happily ran outside and enjoyed playing for a couple of hours, splashing and jumping and running and having a great time. They came in, changed into dry clothes (yes, they still got wet even wearing rain gear), and we had lunch.

The day went on and it poured, and poured, and poured. Our yard is next to agricultural fields that are on an incline, and because it’s chemically poisoned like all fields that grow conventional crops, the dirt is absent any soil health. One result is that it has very little ability to absorb water and with rainfall like this, there was a massive amount of water pouring off the fields.

Through adult eyes, the runoff that entered our yard looked like significant flooding. In the eyes of our children, it was a watery playground! They had SO much fun, lying on their stomachs and trying to swim, zooming through the water on riding toys and scooters, and getting soaked to the skin.

Since this experience, when it starts to rain their first response to rain is to run outside!

My daughter and her family were with us for Shabbos. Once again, there was lots of rain and our walkway flooded, though nothing as much as a few weeks ago. It was still enough for the kids to have a great time running around in the water, balancing on the boards we laid down so people can walk in without getting their shoes soaked, and making up new games to play together. They dubbed the flooded garden bed next to the entrance to our yard ‘the stream’, and went wading in it, bathing their dolls, filling buckets of water and throwing them on each other and finding other activities to do.

It’s invigorating and empowering for children to have opportunities to explore and create new experiences. My daughter commented that I have a lot of patience to allow the kids to play for as long and messily as they did. They’re doing something good for their bodies and minds, bonding with one another and building wonderful memories all at once. Seeing how exhilarating, energizing and engaging this is for them, the changes of clothing, resulting extra laundry and muddy floors are a small tradeoff.

Avivah

I recently went to a school meeting for ds7 and one of the attending therapists commented, “I don’t have to ask whose mother you are because ds7 looks so much like you!”

His teacher, knowing that he’s not my biological child, smiled and asked me in an undertone, “Should I tell them?” I shook my head no.

That’s not the first time that’s happened. When I went to the meeting for all mothers at the beginning of last year for ds7, his teacher was guessing who each mother was as they walked in. I was one of the first mothers to arrive and as I came in to the room, she said, “Let me guess…you’re (ds’s name) mother! He really resembles you.”

In that case, I did laugh and tell her that I’m not his biological parent, which shocked her. (I don’t walk around telling everyone but as his primary teacher, she needed to know.)

When the twins joined the family, my oldest daughter was the first of our married children to meet them. She commented to me that if someone had to guess who dd6’s twin brother was, she thought ds7 looked more like her than ds6, her actual twin. Interesting, right?

Though obviously the twins get their features from their parents, there are enough similarities to our family members that no one who doesn’t know would guess that our foster children weren’t born into the family. I think that ‘matching’ a foster/adoptive family is an extra benefit for a child who isn’t born into a family that helps him feel he belongs. It’s not easy to look visibly different from everyone else in your family, and in fact I’ve learned that this is a painful issue for many in the adoption world.

During Chanuka I took the kids to a local holiday event when a woman came over and asked me if I was a foster parent. I looked at her and her children, and immediately understood she was a foster parent. She told me we have the same social worker and had been keeping her eyes open hoping to meet me. How did she guess who I was?

She obviously put some clues together; she was the person that dd6 was going to be placed with initially so she knew about the twins.

How she definitely didn’t guess who I was, was based on the appearance of our children, whereas with one quick glance at her blond hair and her children of Ethiopian extraction, it was obvious she wasn’t their birth parent.

I don’t see having very different features as a bad thing, but it undisputedly takes away some of a child’s anonymity and privacy. They don’t get to choose who knows that they are in foster care/adopted. Everywhere they go, it’s obvious to everyone who looks at them.

I don’t want that extra attention on me, and I definitely don’t want that extra attention on them. I want them to be able to feel as fully as possible that they have a home and family where they belong, not to have attention drawn to their differences, and not to constantly be questioned as to their relationship to us.

Recently, ds6’s teacher called me to tell me he’s begun to tell his classmates and teachers that we’re his abba and imma (Hebrew for mother and father). Originally when talking to them he referred to us as his Mommy and Daddy; the Hebrew terms were reserved for his bio parents.

He’s also begun to call himself ‘(name) Werner’.

In the first six months whenever the topic of family belonging came up, I told him he’s part of the Werner family and also the ‘(his bio last name)’ family. But now I just let it be. I’ve said it enough and don’t have to continually remind him. He clearly sees himself as a Werner, and I’m glad he feels that he belongs here, because he does.

Obviously ‘matching’ an adoptive or foster family isn’t the most important criteria, but it’s definitely a nice plus!

Avivah

After two weeks of waiting, I finally got feedback on the foster care home visit that recently took place.

The tone of the entire meeting was one of negativity and even hostility towards me. Major positive changes in the children were dismissed with an exclusive focus on external details. I didn’t react to provocatively phrased questions, or to the insinuations that I was lying.

My social worker later told me it was upsetting to be present at the meeting and see how I was treated, but I didn’t take it personally. I trust this person is concerned about the welfare of the children; it’s critical that there to be oversight and supervision for foster children, even if the way it comes across to me is uncomfortable.

Since the meeting took place, I’ve tried not to guess what the reaction or resulting demands on me would be. But I did have some guesses about what kind of things I would hear, based on what elicited the most negativity.

I was so, so wrong.

Nothing that I guessed about was mentioned. Nothing.

During the visit I was asked many detailed questions about different aspects of raising the twins. Here are the criticisms of our foster care arrangements:

-The decor of dd’s room doesn’t feel enough like a girl’s bedroom. Dd’s linen is a floral set with lace edged pillowcases (pale yellow and light blue). When the war began we moved a second bunk bed in since her room is the safe room (in case of missile attacks we would need to have more children sleeping there), and I put matching light blue fitted sheets on each of the other bunks to protect the mattresses. It matches her set and looks nice. But it’s a fact that other than her sheet set the room is gender neutral.

I was told there should be more girls toys displayed. I don’t know if she didn’t notice the two dolls on dd’s bed and admittedly the doll strollers were outside, not in the room. She didn’t like that at the beginning of the meeting that all three children were playing with Duplo (a ‘boy’ toy). I would never have dreamed someone would have looked at that scene of three children playing nicely together in creative ways, and seen the color of the blocks as an issue.

-There isn’t a separate area in dd’s room for her to do projects, or a place on the wall for her projects to be displayed. She doesn’t have a ‘pina shekeita’, a quiet corner of her own.

In our home, bedrooms are mostly for sleeping, and sometimes for playing. But never for crafts. When I take out art supplies for the kids, I put them on the dining room table or outdoor table, and whoever is interested draws or creates there. We display projects on the fridge or sometimes the front door; no one has their own display area. Ironically, dd6 is the only child in the house who has her own room, and while she has a quiet place to play alone, she adamantly doesn’t want to be alone.

The social worker said that if I had a picture of a unicorn and rainbow on the wall the person who complained would have been happier. I laughed and told her dd’s backpack and lunch box are both pink and have unicorns and rainbows on them, she has plenty of pink clothes and feels very happy as the only girl in the family at this time. I don’t think she’s beleaguered by the lack of lavender sheets or pink magnet tiles, but I don’t have a problem with making her room more feminine.

I was concerned that the committee was once again going to impose something on my that would compromise my family, and this focus is a relief to me. While to me this feels like minutia I understand others have a different perspective on what is important. In any case, it’s all very easily remedied – I’ll spend a couple of hundred shekels on pink curtains and pink sheets, and maybe find a girly looking wall decoration. Voila. A suitable foster home for a little girl.

For someone who has an critical eye to find so little to complain about feels like a major accomplishment, and I’m pleased with the outcome.

Avivah

Last week we had a home visit with our social worker, the head of the foster care agency, and the guardian ad litem (court appointed legal representative for the twins – GAL).

It’s taken me until now to find a way to consistently feel neutral towards the GAL after this visit. I’ve repeatedly told myself she means well, but every time I think that to myself, the phrase ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ pops into my mind.

Prior to her visit, I took time with myself to think about how I wanted to interact with her. I guessed she would be very detail oriented and more interested in facts than feelings. That proved to be very accurate.

My own intention was to communicate without allowing myself to be put on the defensive and not worry about what she thought of me, and that was also very appropriate.

I’ve written and rewritten this post, trying to describe a little bit of what it was like as cautiously as possible. My husband has said that since my blog can be publicly accessed, he doesn’t think I should say anything. As such, I’ve deleted all descriptions of what happened.

Overall the meeting went extremely well. I presumed good intentions on her part and stayed calm and composed throughout the entire visit. Dd6, ds6 and ds7 were all home and they couldn’t not have been more well-behaved or responded to her questions better than they did.

It’s not easy to do so much for these children, to see so many positive changes, and have everything peremptorily dismissed as not even worthy of comment. Perhaps it’s common for lawyers to speak to people outside of the courtroom as if they are a defendant on the witness stand, asking leading questions and badgering the witness.

The thing that is hardest for me about foster care is seeing that our children are pawns in a system that doesn’t make their well-being the most important concern. I keep reminding myself that Hashem sent this person to us and she’s doing exactly what she’s meant to do.
I have no way to overcome prejudices that someone else holds that have nothing to do with me.

The reason I didn’t want to write about this until now is because I’ve been searching to put this interaction into a positive perspective, to find a way to give the benefit of the doubt. I don’t like thinking negatively about people and I’ve been trying to feel compassion for this individual, but wasn’t succeeding at all.

Yesterday I spoke with the man who founded the speech method that I’ve recently begun studying. He mentioned that one definition of apraxia of speech is that it can’t be treated. What happens when someone develops a method which has helped hundreds of children who supposedly can’t talk, learn to speak?

Do they rush to his door and ask to learn what he did? Do they tell him how amazing it is that he did something they didn’t think is possible?

No. They stick to their conviction that it can’t be done, even in the face of evidence that shows otherwise. He said this is the natural reaction of the established system in every area.

This comment was like a thunderbolt to me. I had been asking Hashem to help me find a way to think positively about this person, and then I heard this. I realized she’s just reacting the way people in an established system react to something outside of their experience.

There was a lot of focus on the negative behaviors that were part of the past file of one of the children. She said she’s never seen negative behaviors like this dissipate so quickly like they did when the children came to us, and that she can’t see how it’s possible.

If the baseline assumption is that this kind of change can’t be possible because she hasn’t seen it before, then there are only two options: 1) to consider that there’s something to learn from this new outcome and explore how it happened – but there was absolutely no interest in what we did and how that might have positively impacted the children.

Option 2: to insist that it’s not possible and solicit confirmation for her initial decision to oppose placement with us as not being in the best interest of the children.

Thinking about this being a normal reaction to something unfamiliar and unexpected makes this so much easier for me to accept. I don’t want to see her as an enemy who is trying to make my life miserable

It’s also helped release the tension I was feeling trying to anticipate what demands she’s going to impose on me when the committee meets for a follow-up. Now I’ve been able to return to my initial feeling that whatever will be, will be, and trust everything will work out as it’s meant to.

Avivah