Parenting Children Who Have Experienced Trauma

Are you often bewildered by your child's behavior? Check out this interview with Dafna Lender, a LCSW and a certified trainer and supervisor/consultant in both Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy. She is also an EMDR therapist. She is the author of “Theraplay® – The Practitioner’s Guide” and “Integrative Attachment Family Therapy: A Clinical Guide to Heal and Strengthen the Parent-Child Relationship.”

In this episode, we cover:

Impact of Trauma

• What is trauma? 
• Trauma vs PTSD vs. Development Trauma Disorder
• Neglect
• How does trauma impact the brain?
• How does this impact affect the child?
• Does the age of the child, when they experienced trauma, or the type of trauma affect the degree to which the child will be impacted?
• Impact of preverbal trauma- before the child has language and memory.
• If a child is able to leave the abusive situation, can it lower the impact of trauma or PTSD?
• Attachment trauma. 

How to Best Parent a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

• What is a typical behavior for a child who has experienced trauma?
• Internal working model formed with earliest caregivers that forms a template for future relationships with caregivers.
• The children often “reject you before you can reject them.” 
• Importance of awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities and insecurities that may be triggered by caring for children with a history of trauma.
• How to help our kids heal and attach? Tips and Techniques.

How to Discipline a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma 

• See behavior as developmental, not moral.
• Don’t spin into the future by predicting the worst. Deal with your fears.
• Recognize that ultimately, you can’t control your child. Understand what you can control, and you can only control yourself.
• Provide a balance of structure and nurture.
• Time-out?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Dawn Davenport  0:00  
This is creating a family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. Welcome back to our regular listeners, and a special shout out a welcome to our new listeners. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org. Today we're going to be talking about parenting children who have experienced trauma. We will be talking with Daphna Linder. She is a licensed clinical social worker and a certified trainer and supervisor consultant in both theraplay and dyadic developmental psychotherapy. She is also an MDR therapist. She is the author of two books, one, theraplay, the Practitioner's Guide, and two, integrated attachment family therapy, a clinical guide to heal and strengthen the parent child relationship. Welcome dafana to creating a family. It is so good to talk with you. Hey,

Daphna Linder  0:57  
thanks a lot. I'm really happy to be here dawn. Thanks for inviting me.

Dawn Davenport  1:01  
Well, as you can imagine, the people that we serve are parents and children who are involved with foster, adoptive and kinship care. So it is safe to say that the vast majority, if not all, of the children that we support and the families that we support, all the children, have experienced some degree of trauma. So let's start with the obvious, which is the impact of trauma. And it begins with the most obvious, which is, what is trauma? How do we define trauma to help families who are raising these children?

Daphna Linder  1:35  
Trauma is when the person the physiology of the person, so you're somehow bombarded with some event or experience that you're overwhelmed on a physiologic level, so that you feel helpless, out of control, afraid to the point of panic, and The experience is one that overwhelms your capacity to be able to cope with it, and typically it's coupled with the experience of not having someone to support you, be by your side, so that you feel alone. And that's one of the big impactful measures of how trauma becomes PTSD, which is, do you have somebody who is immediately there to support you, hug you, make sense of it and be stable, or is your entire system also completely destabilized and traumatized themselves? Or is the actual source of the trauma the person who is supposed to be taking care of you, in which case that compounds the situation, turns it into PTSD and into what we call developmental trauma disorder, which is the effect of trauma from a caregiver in early age, in the first couple of years of life. Are

Dawn Davenport  2:57  
they all just degrees? You've mentioned three things, trauma and PTSD, post traumatic stress syndrome, and please say the last one again that you mentioned, which was a diagnostic. It's developmental

Daphna Linder  3:09  
trauma disorder, which is, it's a conceptual diagnosis. It's not in the DSM, which is the coding book of psychiatric diagnoses, but it's a diagnostic concept, which is for children who have grown up in situations where the person who's the caregiver that's supposed to take care of you and keep you safe is the one who's either frightening or so frightened themselves that they're unable to take care of you. And that's developmental trauma disorder. How

Dawn Davenport  3:41  
does neglect fit in? Because, honestly, many of the children that we are parenting had experienced neglect, usually quite severe and and very often it is associated with parents who are struggling with substance abuse disorder. And so people think that trauma means that a child has been abused. But where does neglect fit in this?

Daphna Linder  4:03  
Yeah, neglect is as painful and as abusive as being hit or, you know, screamed at and shamed and yelled at. And the reason is is physiologically, the body doesn't have any way to distinguish between being hit or smacked and being left in your crib with a painful diaper rash or having being hungry or cold or in pain and being ignored. So physiologically, it is an overwhelming experience that is extremely dysregulating and frightening, and the feeling of being left with that and being ignored is exceedingly painful.

Dawn Davenport  4:46  
It's traumatic. It is a form of trauma. Yeah, for sure, absolutely,

Daphna Linder  4:51  
you know, if I need to shout out, you know, to anybody to underscore that, if there anybody, anybody listening who's thinking, Oh, well, she was just you. Her mom loved her a lot, but she was just, you know, preoccupied, so she couldn't take care of her, but she was, she was loved. Sadly, that's that doesn't cut it as a exception to the rule of what is trauma,

Dawn Davenport  5:13  
right? And I think that, you know, the people want to believe that it does, because the physical abuse seems worse. Neither are good. So how does trauma impact or does trauma physically impact the brain of a child?

Daphna Linder  5:28  
Yeah, you can absolutely equate it with a traumatic brain injury, as you would if you had been struck in the head or something like that. It's not as an acute glow, but it is the equivalent of having, like, a little injuries, you know, insults to the brain. There's usually a combination in abuse and neglect situations. There's usually a combination of smaller and more sort of quiet types of injuries, for example, being yelled at harshly, or not getting picked up and changed when you're in the crib, or hearing your parents argue and being frightened by that. That's actually small injuries, but they're chronic in the sense that they happen frequently and they add up and make an impact the brain and the body is constricted. It's the hormones in the brain. The stress hormones shrink the brain and cause it not to develop and make the neural connections for learning. It makes a baby stay simply in the state of survival so that they don't develop the curiosity and the kind of relationship building that they need to develop in order to be able to go out in the world and go to kindergarten or make other connections. There's also a different kind of more acute trauma, like, you know, being severely yelled at or hit, or seeing your parents fight with fists and gunshots, or the kinds of things that are so paralyzing that they have an impact that's literally stops the body from functioning for days at a time, so that your digestion doesn't work anymore. Different kinds of effects on the brain body that usually people think of, okay, what was just these, you know, cute events that, for example, you know, the dad came and was threatening and yelling, but that only happened five times, or something like that, or that, coupled with the smaller insults and injuries are What creates a brain or in a body of a child who essentially is underdeveloped, paralyzed, dysregulated and not really able to meet the expectations of you know, I always think of when you go to school as a child, you're not you have to meet a lot of expectations I have, being able to Sit in a chair, being able to listen, being able to sit in circle time, being able to socialize, and all those things they're just not only not prepared for it. It's actually their experiences worked against them, being able to do that super, super high reach for them, to be able to acclimate into that kind of demanding environment, and that's often when teachers or social workers or some other, you know, professionals catch on to the fact that, well, what is going on with this child?

Dawn Davenport  8:31  
Does the age of the child, when they experience the trauma, or even the type of trauma affect the degree to which the child will be impacted? Yeah,

Daphna Linder  8:41  
there's certainly evidence that the earlier the child is impacted, so including in utero, which, you know, being exposed to drugs and alcohol and other toxin in utero, being a victim of domestic violence in utero, and the mother being extremely stressed. And then the early infancy and the earlier years, especially the first three years, makes the greatest impact on the capacity for being able to develop and socially, emotionally, intellectually. This

Dawn Davenport  9:14  
is the pre verbal trauma. This is before the child has language or memory, which is is deceptive, because the child has no memory of what has happened, and yet it has happened, and that makes it particularly hard, from what you're saying then, for the child to process what has happened. Am I understanding you correctly?

Daphna Linder  9:35  
Yeah, that you bring in another, a whole other topic here, which is, this is one of the important paradoxes of psychology, which is, if you don't remember it because it was before you were verbal, it's actually worse. And to adults, it seems that if you can't remember it right, it didn't happen, and it usually is the reason adults forget that. Is because it helps them with the pain of this knowledge. So adults, parents, teachers, you know, even adult adoptees, we prefer to deny and forget that the pre verbal trauma is more impactful and more damaging because of how uncomfortable it is. And also, because a child can't attest to what happened to them, the mechanism for sort of saying, well, it didn't happen. She doesn't remember it is compounded. So there's a real danger in not remembering. This paradox needs to be number one, number one on the top of the list of things to know about kids who were adopted and who have had pre verbal trauma, keep that paradox as the number one. Write it down as you're on the top of the list on the refrigerator as to what's explaining the behavior. The problem is is a lot of times we don't know what happened to them exactly. And I've spent essentially my entire adult life trying to figure out through the behavior of the child, what happened to the child that, you know, we don't have evidence from the records, because they were adopted from an orphanage, or because the records are really, really sparse, and they got lost along the way, and we don't know where the

Dawn Davenport  11:15  
birth you got. Some information you may have, okay, the child was neglected. You know that may and hence why they were brought into care, but you don't know anything else that may have happened, right?

Daphna Linder  11:26  
And so that's why I've spent like a forensic scientist, trying to figure out from the behaviors what happened. That's what I try to do, because I want to be able to suggest possibilities to the child of what happened to them? Because I think it's really important. People think, Well, are you feeding in ideas to the child that you don't know if they happen? Well, I have a strong need to help the child to understand themselves, and I'm putting together from my I I understand that, for example, if a child couldn't bear weight on her legs at age 15 months, what does that mean? She was she was plump and she was not malnourished, but she couldn't bear weight on her legs at 15 months, what does that mean? What does that mean? It means that she was not picked up and was not allowed to get out of her crib, and she did not get a chance to explore and toddle around. Those are not just motor experiences. Those are relational experiences. She probably would have been sitting in her crib or in a car seat, static and tied to, you know, her car seat, because a baby who isn't able to bear weight on their legs, means that they were restrained, a baby will always be curious and always try to get mobile and always try to ambulate wherever they can. By the time, you know, they're a couple of months old, they're crawling, and after that, they're seeking, you know. But if they're restrained, that's extremely damaging to a child's development to be tied up.

Dawn Davenport  13:07  
So use that by way of example, that being able to be forensic by using the behavior of the child to figure out some of what happened. So if a child is able to leave the abusive situation, which is the case for most of the people that we are serving, can it lower the impact of the trauma or the PTSD?

Daphna Linder  13:31  
Yeah, it certainly changes the trauma and the PTSD. And I'll say it changes it. Let me give an image or a metaphor that the idea of building resources around a child who was traumatized is that there's a circle which is the core of the trauma that is within the child's body and mind, and our adding more experiences that are healthy, that are developmentally appropriate, that are healing, that are facilitating a child's being able to see themselves differently. Come as circles that come around the core circle and expand the existence of the child. And there's just imagine, you know, circles that concentric circles moving out, right? Yeah, exactly. Thank you for that. Concentric circles moving out that fill in more of the child's experience of themselves. And it doesn't take away from the trauma. It adds other experiences, and then the other experiences will allow integration of that core trauma, because each time a child does something wrong, that is behaviorally, you know, not okay, and a parent responds with, Hey, you're not allowed to hit not going to hurt you. I'm not going to let you hurt me. Now, we're going to turn you around, and we're going to walk this way, and you're going to help me to weed the garden or something that. Is a corrective experience that is still connecting, and that is not shaming, and that moves the child onto something constructive and relational. That is a integrative experience. It makes the core trauma get smaller because the child's learning okay if I make a mistake or act out, out of my pain, I will not be responded to with more pain and shame. I'm going to be supported and so maybe I am a decent person. That's one of the shifts that happen when you're supported over time.

Dawn Davenport  15:38  
Would it be fair then to say that the trauma exists. It never completely goes away, but the more circles we add, the more protection we add, the more integration we are adding, the better able the child is to cope with and I liked how you said that the trauma can get smaller. It may never go away, but we can add protection around the child, and that is our role as a parent. Would that be a fair summary of what you just said?

Daphna Linder  16:06  
Yeah, that's a very elegant summary. Thank you.

Dawn Davenport  16:11  
Let me interrupt briefly to tell you about our Facebook group. Creating a family has an online support group. It is a closed Facebook group. It is a tremendous place to find support, ask questions and talk with others who are parenting kids who've experienced trauma. You can check out and join that group by going to facebook.com/groups/creating a family. All right, let's now move to talk about how best to parent a child who has experienced trauma, because that's where the rubber meets the road. We know we can understand trauma, and I do think that's important as a basis, but it really is just the basis. So right now, I want to talk about how best to parent a child who has experienced trauma in general. And then I want to move to the latter part of our discussion today to talk about how to discipline a child who has experienced trauma, which some parents would say that's where the real rubber meets the road. But let's talk now about just in general, what is a typical behavior for a child who has experienced trauma. And I realized by saying that that there is no universal but we do. We can cluster things. We can see some typical things to expect, behaviors to expect, because our children often can't express their emotions, or they do express their emotions through behavior. So when you talked about being a forensic scientist, in a way, that's what you're saying. We're using their behaviors to tell us what they're feeling and their emotions are. So what are some of the behaviors we might look for?

Daphna Linder  17:52  
Before I answer that, I want to go back and say that when we talk about trauma from a developmental perspective, we're talking about that the one who's supposed to keep the child safe and comfort them is the one who is scaring them, or is scared themselves and unable to protect them. And so that is attachment, trauma and attachment. Here is the relationship that a baby has with their parent, where they're bonded to the parent in a special way that they seek the parent out to get their needs met and get that sense of self and that sense of connection, and that parent is the one who is not protecting them or his frightening and I can't talk about behaviors without talking about attachment trauma or attachment injuries, because that's the most important kind of trauma is attachment trauma. So having said that some of the common behaviors. One cluster is a child who is hyperactive and silly and, quote, unquote, doesn't listen. So very distractible. Make make tons of, you know, noises, and go off topic and be really annoying, and then also switch to being withdrawn or like they're not listening, they might be more still and quiet, and yet they're not connected, and you're constantly not knowing how to match them, because do they want to be energetic and do they want you to jump around with them, or do they want to be left alone? And it feels like everything you do there's a 5050, chance you're going to get it wrong, because they're so dysregulated, and they go from that hyperactive to withdrawn, okay? And that's like very distinct dysregulatory pattern that can't that comes exactly from what I was talking about, that early abuse and neglect of the trauma and then their children. And this is not some of the children have all of these symptoms. This isn't discrete categories. Another phenomenon is a child who is superficially really sweet and particularly cooperative outside of the home, and may be able to charm teachers. And that kind of behavior is a great strategy for outside. Side, but the relationships remain superficial, so that the child really isn't able to have good friends, because the child is actually very controlling, especially to the people who are closest to them, like their parents. It feels like the child is always controlling the situation, saying like the opposite of what the parent said is, you know, even if you say, like, Bring me that blue ball, and the kid will say, that's not blue. So it's like crazy making. And will essentially give many signals of rejection to the parent, for example, will say, I want, you know, grilled cheese. And then you make them grilled cheese, and they say it's too burnt, so you make them another one, and then it's too soggy. And then the child is fussing and actually crying and saying that they don't like their food. And they somehow make it seem like the parent is the one to blame. And when the other parent comes in the room, the child runs to the you know, the second parent, and hugs them and says, you know, Mommy didn't make me the grilled cheese the way I want it. And it feels really manipulative and like you can't satisfy their need. You understand that they have a need, they're hungry, but they won't let you satisfy it, and so you as a parent are left feeling like I am so tense, so stressed, so dissatisfied with myself, because all I want to do is connect and give this child what she needs, but she's constantly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm doing it wrong. That's a very hard behavior, because it can be really subtle, and other people on the outside don't see it.

Dawn Davenport  21:39  
And it is, you say crazy making it is, and it's also because what you're really seeking is, as the parent, you're seeking to connect, and it's hard not to take it personally when a child, what it feels like, won't let you attach. That is from the parent feeling, even though that may not well be what's happening. And is it because our children are using the template that they've had with their earliest caregivers? Yeah, that's exactly right, Don and trying to reapply that, or what has worked for them in the past?

Daphna Linder  22:14  
That's exactly yeah. That's exactly why those first three years are so impactful, because the system is so ready. The relational system inside a baby is so ready to be imprinted on it's that inner working model that John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, introduced, of what I as a baby can expect of other people in the world, and what I think about myself is literally set down as an imprint on the baby's neurophysiology, and because that window in those first three years is just you're open, and the brain is simply receptive to grabbing that and just placing it in there like it's hardwired.

Dawn Davenport  22:59  
And if children don't have that during that time, they're always going to be not always, but they will be struggling to create that, to try to heal, or you as parents, are going to be working to heal that attachment trauma that happened at the very beginning. Right? And it does feel like when our kids are rejecting us, or that feels like they are rejecting us. How much of this is that I'm going to reject you before you can reject me. This is particularly the case of children who have been through multiple placements, either through foster care or through internationally, having gone through many caregivers. So there's been a repetitive caregivers. So the expectation is this is not going to last, therefore, I'm going to protect myself. Do we see that as well?

Daphna Linder  23:45  
Yeah, that's a really fair coping strategy that children have. And it is when you are profoundly, profoundly disappointed and shamed to the point of despair that people have left you and that along the way, they've also neglected and abused you and betrayed you. So one of the biggest words here for experiences is betrayal. The person who was supposed to take care of me and made me promises, person who said that they care about me and my perspective did not protect me, and they lied to me. And kids actually really feel that when you take them away from their birth parents or their birth siblings, or whatever other situation they were in that they were comfortable in, they feel that they were lied to, and they feel extremely foolish, like they were tricked. And they say to themselves, I will never, ever let that happen to me again. And so when they go into the next foster home or to the next foster home or to the adaptive home, they feel that the system betrayed them and that it was their fault they were idiots for believing and they won't let you in. And so they absolutely it is a very strong pattern in humans. That we will try to do that which we fear most will happen to us at our instigation, so that we feel we have more control, right? So if I do stuff to make it impossible for my foster parents to keep me at least, I know that the inevitable is coming at my investigation,

Dawn Davenport  25:19  
right? I'm expecting it. I'm preparing for it. They're not rejecting me. I never wanted them to begin with. You know exactly, and if you think about it, that's a far easier scenario, because at least they have control. It

Daphna Linder  25:33  
is and it leaves them. It leaves them independent and alone, no matter how high the price is, it leaves them independent and alone, and they far prefer it. So they prefer being in the room, being on their phone, basically saying to the foster parents, like, Uh huh, yeah, yeah, whatever. But actually, in their hearts, in their own minds, they're thinking, forget you. I'm not listening to a word. I'm not agreeing with a word you say, and I'm not going to listen to your rules. I'm going to do exactly what I want to do as soon as I get out of this house, it creates a real distance, because you just can feel that the kid is just like I'm not listening to you, and the parents feel like I am not able to reach this kid or make an impact, you

Dawn Davenport  26:13  
know. And something that I think it's important to talk about is the way that what we as parents bring to this, because what you've just described is as a difficult situation for any parent, and some of us, it is even harder for because of our own needs, our own vulnerabilities, our own attachment styles, our own how we were raised, in our own our own trauma. So we're bringing, as parents a host of things with us. We may not recognize it, but we're bringing a host of our own issues, and that when we face kids who won't connect with us, or who outwardly defy us or whatever, it's important for us to realize what are we bringing to the table? What are our triggers? And so how do you help parents do that? Oh,

Daphna Linder  27:05  
gracious, that is exactly the core of where it's at in terms of my work and what I've centered my work on. Over the years, I've shifted a lot more to working with the parents, the adaptive parents. Interesting, because you said this early on, Don and I think it's really important parents take things personally, because we're wired to our child is very personal to us. Sure that is a normal expectation that a parent has when they have a child, when you're dealing with a child who has therapeutic needs, all of a sudden, that expectation goes out the window in terms of you can't expect your child to validate you, to mirror you and to meet your needs or let you know that you're going in the right direction. And that requires a level of, I don't want to say detachment. It's a spiritual capacity to step back and let go of the ego drive of the need to be validated by your child. It is so incredibly hard, and it is a devastating shift that I wish parents would adoptive parents would be instructed or told this from the beginning and accompanied by a therapist from the beginning. An adoptive parent needs a therapist from the beginning, because this phenomenon of needing to let go of expectations of validation from your child is one that accompanies you. It gets better, it gets you know, there's times where it gets worse or it gets better, but the need to be able to detach from your child and say, be able to say, I am validating myself. I'm doing this because I chose to, and there's value in what I do, regardless of what he's giving back to me is something that is a position you have to come back to over and over again. And it's a spiritual practice. It's very hard.

Dawn Davenport  29:06  
Yeah, it is, but so important. So now let's talk about some practicalities here. So how do we help our kids attach? How do we help our kids heal? What are some things or tips techniques that you could give to parents that they would now we're going to talk discipline in a minute, so let's keep discipline a little separate here, even though, of course, that's part and parcel to parenting. But what are some ways that parents one tip you just gave that is so important and that is try to separate your own value from the way your kids behave and respond to you, boy, that's an important one, and let's put it number one.

Daphna Linder  29:45  
Yeah, let's put a number one. And because managing and raising children is a two person job, it is a two way street. And again, I'm using sort of a visual metaphor, but. But it's a really a two way street, and you're coming with your stuff, and your child is coming with their stuff. And anytime you are interacting with your child over a stressful or point of contention, you're bringing your own energy. You are bringing yourself and the way you communicate is going to affect the way the child reacts, and a lot of the subsequent Fallout, or the way he's going to respond has to do with how you bring yourself in the first place. And I'm not saying that you're the cause of the behavior, whether you know it's going to succeed or not. I'm simply saying that you have to see yourself as 50% of the equation in this dance. It is a dance. Okay, so what does that mean? It means look at yourself over the course of the day and see what percentage of the time are you feeling like? Dysregulated so that you're feeling out of your mind, you're feeling stressed out, you're feeling like you want to tear your hair out. You're on the verge of tears. Your voice is quivering because you feel like crying. You feel like I can't wait for this kid to, you know, go to his friend's house because I can't stand him. Or are you yelling? Are you feeling like you're hiding in the bathroom a ton of the time, or trying to withdraw into your bedroom? Or, you know, on your phone, let's check the extent of the time that you feel that level of stress in a day when your child is around, okay, so on a Saturday or whenever your child is actually around, because a child sees their parent and sees the parents dysregulation, and that makes them feel unsafe. And if their parent is unhappy, dysregulated, crying, depressed, you know, constantly triggered. It makes the child feel that constant level of stress that they had before when they were free and were in an abusive situation. They take their cue off of your physiology, and if you're more balanced, they are going to feel more organized, calm and secure. What does that mean? Typically, if you're exposed to a child with a lot of behavior attachment, behavior problems for a long length of time, like you're with the child for six hours straight, you're going to get to that place that I just explained, where you're feeling like stressed out and triggered and on edge, or really fatigued, and you were giving up, and you feel like I don't care what he does. What does that mean? It means you need to get a lot of help and support and not have the child not be exposed to the child for long lengths of time alone. Wow. Does that change things? Because that means you have to reorganize your entire life to make it so that you're not home alone for a Saturday with a child alone, you have to have a partner, you have to have babysitter. You have to have help from family. You have to put them in daycare, and, you know, school and after school care. You have to make sure that they go to camp every single week of the summer, and hopefully even overnight camp if you are exposed and you have to hold on to all of this responsibility of caring for this child, you're going to get burned out that affects the child's capacity to like, perform optimally and to grow. So is that a tip for raising a child and behaviors issues? It is, but it has to do with the parent well,

Dawn Davenport  33:23  
and also when you say, get help and support, your goal would be to get outside help and support through support groups and therapy, so that you are able to be more balanced when you are with the child, so that you are not constantly having to say, I can't be Around the kids, so therefore I'm going to have to, you know, there's not a single week in the summer that we cannot be in. The goal is that you're balancing yourself so that I see what I mean. Yeah,

Daphna Linder  33:51  
I see what you mean. And I don't want to make it sound like that. Only thing to do is to make sure that your kid is in daycare and camp. But I'm going to tell you something, no matter how balanced you are and how many support groups you go to when a kid is constantly pestering and bugging you and making you know, manipulations and different kinds of messes and things like that, even the most sane, regulated, therapized person can handle it for three hours only. That's kind of what I'm saying. I want to say that, if at all possible, you need to have somebody to tag team throughout. If it's a Saturday and it's a long day and you are going to be with them, then somebody needs to tag team with you, or you've got to get a whole bunch of movies set up, and it's okay to put them in front of the TV. I'm really being realistic, because mostly I work with the parents who are the most in the most extreme and most desperate situations where they're trying to avoid having to send their child to residential or to the hospital. And so you might think that I'm saying this from, you know, a more extreme point of view, but I found this to be very true, that you can't you need so much time. Time where you have help in the home or other kinds of external help with the child you

Dawn Davenport  35:05  
are working with the most extreme, but we can calibrate that back and the same advice of getting help, getting support, even if it's not in the most extreme situations. You may not as you're saying, you're working with people who are at the very edge. So what about other tips and techniques we've talked about separate your value from your child's responses to you see yourself as what are you bringing to this equation? It's a two way street, getting lots of help and support. Well, help and support and help. And as you point out, that can mean some screen time. Yes, it can, if that works. Any other tips

Daphna Linder  35:43  
try to not have a lot of really, really highly exciting things that are supposed to be really motivating for the child and make them, you know, feel super psyched, just so that right afterwards they're going to feel this crash where they're going to be really disappointed and say that everything's no good and rotten because they can't have yet more of that. So I'm suggesting keeping expectations really low, keeping routines really high and expectations low. I mean that the child you know shouldn't be promised like, here I'll get you another game boy, or I'm going to take you to Great America, if you know that he's going to that's only going to cause more dysregulation. That's what I'm talking about. You know, not giving a lot of like, high impact rewards to the child, because, again, that could really dysregulate kids in backfire, keeping routines in structure, so having a schedule for the day, having a set of choices of what they can and can't do during the certain set of, you know, hours of the day, and you just being really pretty predictable yourself. So I'm literally talking about moving you, moving in a fluid way so that you're not like, really jumpy and jittery and sort of very, very reactive. It's really important that, when I'm talking about the environment and routines, you as well, have to have that sort of capacity to be really regulated. So another thing that it's kind of going into discipline. You know, it's not just discipline. It's a way of being, is that you need to be able to accept and empathize with the child's underlying wishes, motivations for the behavior that they're doing that could be an unacceptable behavior. For example, they took something from their brother's room, like they took their brother's iPad from his room, and they're not allowed to go in there, and I use, not allowed to use the iPad, so, you know, you catch him, and then you say, Well, you know, I see you took your brother's iPad, and so you know, you're gonna get your own screen time taken away for the day, whatever the consequences. And the kid's gonna say, I hate you. You're not fair. You You always give my brother more privileges than me. And so those things that the child says, usually, the parents will react with justifications and rationales and defenses like, that's not true. You have the exact same amount of screen time, and also you even have a better iPad, you have a more and you have a ton of privileges, and plus your brothers, blah, blah, blah, okay, so what I want parents to do, yeah, it is very natural to do that and defend ourselves. I was sitting

Dawn Davenport  38:35  
here thinking, Yes, done that. I

Daphna Linder  38:37  
know you all did, and all of us do, and I completely believe everybody and the idea of acceptance and empathy for the underlying wishes, beliefs or motivations is they have something underneath that caused them to act impulsively, and when they say, I hate you, you're not fair, you would want to say something accepting and empathic to that say, You know what accepting would mean. Hey, you know what it's important for me to know what's on your mind. So that is not a judgment. It's an acceptance. It's like I hear you in an empathic statement. Would be if you feel like I like your brother more and I you know that I'm unfair, I could sure understand why you would be mad at me, and that makes sense. Now, I know parents think, Okay, well, what's that going to help? It is going to help the kid might say, Stop talking to me. Shut up. I don't believe you. It's important that you say an accepting statement and an empathic statement, because you're showing them I hear you, and I don't think that you're like, really extreme statement and language there is because you're a bad kid, like You're rotten and you're evil. I hear you, and I understand from your point of view what's going on, and that it's got to be yucky. And then the next thing I would then do is offer to, you know, say. When you're ready or feeling better? Well, do you want to come and help me make the salad? Because you're really good at cutting cucumbers, and then I want you to, like, turn on your heel and walk towards a kitchen and go make salad, and I want you to keep sort of reinforcing them, saying you're not fair. I hate you. You're you know, you so it doesn't mean you don't give a consequence. If the consequence that you set out previously in your house was that if you abused your screen privileges, you get your screen privilege taken away for that day, and taking your brother's iPad is abusing your screen privileges, then you take it away for that day, and then you say, and you could try again tomorrow. And that's all there is to it.

Dawn Davenport  40:42  
Don't get caught up into their their arguments. So what you're also saying is consistency, which you said earlier, which is parents need to be predictable and consistent. Yes, I

Daphna Linder  40:53  
want to sort of give a little caveat, because consistency is such a touchstone of good parenting, and I think that we have a hard time being consistent, and it's totally normal as parents. And I think the reason we have a hard time being consistent is because the behaviors that children do, they might, on one day, they might feel like the consequence should be x, and on the other day, the same behavior feels like it should be y. And I actually think that that's true, because if a child is acting totally crazy and not listening, but you know, he's had a really long day, and he's been in in school and in aftercare, and his brain is fried, I if he throws something at me, I'm not going to discipline him for him for that. I might say, hey, that's right. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to let you hurt me, you know. But maybe if he is throwing something and he did it on purpose on a Saturday and he's perfectly calm and he just rude at his sister because he just decided to be mean to her, then maybe that does deserve a consequence. So do you see that consistency actually should the same behavior does not always get the same consequence, because we have to understand the context of the child's physiology and their mental state and the context. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  42:13  
that does make sense. I want to pause here briefly to tell you about a really wonderful resource that creating a family has. It is a prenatal substance exposure workshop for parents. It is a three session, interactive, facilitated workshop to help parents whose children have experienced the prenatal trauma of exposure to alcohol and drugs. It's one of the things I am most proud of that we have developed. You can get more information at Bitly slash prenatal dash exposure, dash training. That's B, I T, dot, l, y slash prenatal dash exposure, dash training. All right, let's now move to have a discipline a child who has experienced trauma? This may be one of the top questions we get, and it's hard, because we recognize, as you have just said, that the behaviors are often an expression of the trauma they have experienced. On the other hand, there are rules, the families can only function with rules, and there are certain things that simply we can't have, and yet, we want to foster connectivity and attachment with our children, but we also have to have rules. So how do we do that? How do we discipline children who have experienced trauma?

Daphna Linder  43:32  
I really want to say that there's as many ways to discipline a child who has trauma as there are parents and children, and the more I've worked, the more I understand that. So it's so general that people might feel like, Oh yeah, I already did that and it didn't work, or this won't work. So I always hesitate. I work with parents very specifically on what you know is going on with them and their needs. But I think one of the big principles is you have to see behaviors as a developmental issue and not a moral issue. Let's start with that. So if a child, a child was lying and stealing, I want people to not say something like, You know what? I can't trust you, and you're lying to me, so I'm not going to be able to trust you for the next time you want to go over to your friend's house by yourself on your bike, that makes it into a moral issue, using like you're lying and I can't trust you, I would see it as a developmental issue all the time and say, You know what, I let you go on your bike to your friend's house, and you ended up at the park instead, and didn't call like we agreed, which means that next time I'm going to drive you over to your friend's house, or I'll ride with you because you're not ready for that privilege, and we'll try again in two weeks. That is a different message than I can't trust you. If the child is taking your money from your purse something like you know that that is it feels like a huge violation. The biggest thing is. First of all, you need to protect yourself. So you need to get all your stuff and put it in a place where they can't reach it to the extent possible. You need to also know that you're living with somebody who's got major boundary problems, and so you're going to be angry, and you need a place to be able to talk about that so you can regulate yourself. If you think your child stole the money, you don't say, Hey, I was wondering, like I missed, missing out on $20 and I found it in your in your room. So did you take it? Don't set them up to lie. You usually know if it's them, they're going to say, No, I didn't. And then you say, Well, you know what? I know it's you. And so you're setting them up to lie and be in trouble for stealing the money. You just say you took my money without my permission, and now you're going to have to give it to me from your piggy bank, or you're going to have to do work for me to make it up to me, you know, or I won't be giving you money to go, you know, to buy the Game Boy. But the idea is, is I didn't use your thief, your liar. I can't trust you. I think people commonly say, actually, he does know the difference, and it is a moral issue, because he is 15, and so pretty soon, he's going to be 18, going to be out on the streets, and he's going to get trouble by the law, and going to get thrown in jail, and, you know, he could get killed. He got it. And this comes to friends, this comes to a place that I touched upon before, which is, as a parent, you're scared. You want to have a sense of that you're protecting your child. You also feel like you're need to be in control, and that the police is going to come and talk to you if your kid is doing bad things, you're the one who's going to get, you know, called into the principal's office or whatever. Ultimately, we cannot control our child, and I want that to sink in. That's why I was quiet for a moment. Because if your kid is going to steal from you or run out in the middle of the night, you can lock up everything you have into a safe. You can put locks on the doors and those kinds of things. But if they want to, they're going to go out the door and find a way to steal. Okay, I'm saying that because it comes back to that spiritual place of trying to recalibrate what it is that you can control and what it is that you can't control, and be able to deal with the fear, the rage that you have inside, legitimately. You have to be able to deal with it with a compassionate friend, a therapist, a spouse or a support group, or in whatever way you find a way to recalibrate so that you can be calm enough to be present, enough to set boundaries and still be open, like have that thread of connection open The overture of connection to the child, but also really protect your own boundaries. And that's, you know, a really important principle here is that you can't control your child. You can only control yourself.

Dawn Davenport  47:52  
Does this matter? The examples we're giving or children upper elementary into tweens and teens? Do Things change when we're talking about a four year old or a three year old or a five year old. You know, of

Daphna Linder  48:05  
course, you can control your child a lot easier if you can pick them up. Of course, my examples are of older children, but I think even of parents of four year olds, they actually overreact because they're afraid that their child is going to grow up to be, you know, a violent and dangerous teenager. So I think the principle still applies that you can control yourself and not your child. I don't want to do anything by force with a child of you know, I might have to pick her up, if she's like in the social hall at synagogue and she's screaming and, you know, making a fuss, I might pick her up and bring her into the library so she can calm down. Of course, that's my job, right? But if I tell a child to go to her room and she refuses to and starts, you know, kicking or something or having a tantrum on the floor, and she's seven or eight, I'm not going to tower over her and say, get into your room, or else, I don't want to do that.

Dawn Davenport  49:01  
What are your feelings about timeout, standard parenting approach? You know, it's

Daphna Linder  49:08  
kind of a bad rap. I have to say, a lot of kids with attachment issues just cannot at the time that they're feeling so rotten, horrible, rageful and dysregulated, they don't want their parent in the room, and their parents presence is, in actually really bothersome to them. So I don't love timeouts, like, Okay, go to your room and you stay there for seven minutes until you think about and calm down. No, I don't like that, but I do think that the idea of, you know what, it's time for us to take a break from one another. So you're going to your room, and I'm going to go into my office, and you know, you take your time to play with your dolls or do whatever you need to do, and I'll check on you in seven minutes. Is a different tone, and the recommendation of time in for kids with attachment issues, what I'm saying is that they might be physiologically so dysregulated that they don't want you to rock them. Them, or sing to them, or sit with them quietly in the room and read a book. Those are wonderful things, and I would happily do them as soon as the child is ready. But you have to understand that some kids are not ready for that for another 510, or 15 or 20 minutes, and so they don't want you in their room. And so that's a reality. I'm just wanting to put that out there,

Dawn Davenport  50:21  
and that helping our kids with self regulation by modeling regulation that can take place from if I'm hearing you correctly, once the child has calmed down or what and what and honestly what's the parent has calmed down.

Daphna Linder  50:35  
Yeah. I mean, what I was saying by that is that as soon as the child is able to receive any kind of help from you in the room, then go to the room. But a lot of times you'll go in and, like, you'll say, Hey, can I bring you a glass of water or something? And they'll be like, Can I hear a yay? Well, and so you have to respect it. You got to get out. Because they're saying, they're physiologically saying, I am too dysregulated to have you in my room. Is that a call to time out? No, it's a time for, like, resetting both of the nervous systems in separate rooms, until the time, yeah, that you can come in with, like, a repair, you know, an overture of repair, like, can I bring a glass of water?

Dawn Davenport  51:13  
And I have found it effective to give a redo. I bring that up because you say repair. I so often find that when our kids screw up, offering them the opportunity to try again and do it in a different way, it doesn't always work, but when it does, it just helps the whole house move forward, as opposed to getting stuck.

Daphna Linder  51:33  
Oh, lovely. I love that a redo is so generous and so like. It just, it's just so refreshing. It's like, let me just, let me just, you know, give myself another chance to act like a human being. I love that,

Dawn Davenport  51:47  
and we pray that our children give us reduce too. Oh, 100% Yeah, exactly. Well. Thank you so much. Daphna Linder for being with us today to talk about parenting kids who've experienced trauma, I truly appreciate your wisdom and your expertise. Oh,

Daphna Linder  52:04  
thank you. It's been a real honor, and really nice to talk to you Dawn

Dawn Davenport  52:10  
and before you leave. Let me remind you about our jockey being family courses. They are sponsored by and provided through the generous support of the jockey being Family Foundation, they are courses that are geared for parents, be they foster, adoptive or kinship parents. They do come with their certificate of completion. If you need that, if you don't, you can still take the course and learn. Check it out at Bitly, slash, JBf, support. That's B, I T, dot, l, y, slash, JBf, support, foreign.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai