Manipulation Madness

Q: My foster child can be amazingly manipulative, all the time! If I lovingly respond to her, am I not just reinforcing this behavior?

My Daughter is Ruining My Time!

		Q: When trying to embrace my daughter (age 13) during stressful times, I began to realize that she has created crises over and over to receive that kind of love and attention. It ended up whenever I had a plan and it didn't include her (work, coffee with a friend, etc.), she'd have a crisis (feel sick, kick the wall and insist on a trip to the E.R., lock herself in her room). Then, when I started to include her in everything, she'd sabotage it (push the table over in the restaurant, break equipment at work, ruin clothes in stores at the mall, etc.). I felt like I was being completely controlled and "trained" to focus only on her all of the time. How do you manage that in moderation?
A: There are several dynamics going on in the relationship between you and your daughter. First, let's look beyond the behavior to determine why children "create crises." The voice of this type of behavior is saying, "I need to feel loved and I need to have attention so I know I won't be lost in this world!" Behavior is the language of our children. As adults, we communicate verbally and miss the voice of our children because these behaviors interrupt the flow of our day and are often so nerve grinding, we can't listen to them! Your daughter is expressing that she is insecure in her attachment relationship with you. When you leave home without her, the acting out or sicknesses begin. Although I do not have her exact history, this tells me that she has experienced severe abandonment in the past. She is terrified of you leaving her…it feels like you won't ever come back. Her perception and fear of you leaving her is more than just an idea -- it is her reality. Our thoughts become our reality. Try to relate to her fear in a situation in your life. If you were convinced, for some reason, that your husband would be injured in a car accident on his way to work, you would do EVERYTHING in your power to keep him from leaving the house. You might yell in desperation to get him to understand the seriousness of this issue. You might even feign an illness in your efforts to have him stay home with you. This is your daughter's story. Her fear of losing you is driving these behaviors. Then, when you took her with you, I have a feeling that she was with you simply out of desperation on your part. However, even though she was with you, I suspect you weren't really with her 100%. You didn't want her there because this was supposed to be your time to take care of yourself and you felt like you didn't have any other choice but to take her with you. This is all understandable, and unfortunately, happens too many times to parents simply out of their own survival. However, we need to look openly and honestly at the dynamic that is created in such a scenario. So you take her with you, all the while, the monsters of resentment, anger, regressive attitude of "whatever," and intolerance raise their ugly heads. These stressors become barriers to your connection with her. You are physically with her, but not emotionally engaged and not paying attention to her from an intrinsic, core level within you. Your daughter is very intuitive; she can sense the barriers of your resentment and your state of survival. If you are in a place of survival, you cannot be in a place of unconditional love for someone else. Your focus is on you, leaving no emotional space for your child and rendering you unable to respond to your child in an authentic and personal way. Due to her intense fear of losing you, she needs you to connect with her at every level possible. This means connecting with her through your metacommunication (your tone of voice, timing of your responses, inflection in your voice, your physical touch, your body posture and body language, your facial expressions, your eye contact, etc.). It takes using all of your senses to fully be in relationship with your child in order to create security with a child who is so overtly insecure. When you're unable to do this, the result is that your daughter is left feeling even more unsafe, unprotected, and insecure. At this point, you are now in a public place and she is sensing your disconnect and, additionally, she becomes overwhelmed and threatened by being in a new environment. She shifts into a place of complete overwhelm and her behaviors are out of control. The mother/daughter connection is lost, so efforts to regulate her and calm her prove futile. You become stressed and the public humiliation is making the hair on the back of your neck rise. Your thought process goes something like this, "She's ruining my time, again! I should have just left her home!" Disaster strikes once again. There is a better way. Understanding this dynamic, let's look at what can be done to create security for her. We know that children become secure when they feel accepted, approved, validated, and acknowledged. It will take having some experiences with her, just the two of you, to create this security. It can be as simple as a "Girl's Night Out" and driving down to have ice cream or something special in a quiet and calm environment, just the two of you. It isn't about the ice cream, though. It is about your relationship with her. It requires you to be authentic and fully present with her. She is old enough to be able to express her fears of you leaving her. Point out what would happen in the past when you left. Let her know that you now understand that these behaviors were signals of her being so scared of you leaving. Apologize for not "hearing" her. Commit to making it different with her. Help her to express her fears when you are both calm and regulated. It will help diffuse the ignition of acting out behaviors the next time you leave without her. Validate her fears. Acknowledge how scary it must feel every time you leave home without her. Accept her reaction to your absence. Reassure her that you want to make this better for her. The next time you have to leave, spend at least 15 minutes of one-on-one time with her prior to leaving. Set up a plan for her to call you when she feels scared. Make your time away from her short at first. Prolonged absences can be too overwhelming to her regulatory system. You can begin to build on these times away, but start slowly. Remember that children heal through relationships. Therapeutic worksheets, behavior charts, and logical consequences don't promote in-depth healing. It takes you being 100% present in relationship when you are with her in order for her to begin to feel safe when you're not with her.

Celebrate and Stop the Crazy Loop

					Q: I have a 15-year-old son who has established a pattern of running away. I've been advised to call the police when this occurs. What do you suggest? A: Running away is indicative of a child who has entered a fear state. When we, and all animals in the animal kingdom become threatened, we go into a primitive response called the "Fight or Flight" response. It is an inborn genetic response, which helps to protect us; it is a survival response.
With this understanding, it perplexes me to think that calling the police on a child in this survival response pattern would ever be recommended. Why would you call out the police to address a child who is simply acting from his body's primitive, automatic, and inborn response? Your child is acting from an unconscious level. It isn't a conscious response; it is an unconscious reaction. Addressing it from an authoritarian and fear based approach will only keep your child in this pattern; hence, you described it as an "established pattern." We have somehow come to believe that we can force change by provoking fear and threat. This is completely unnatural. Have you ever seen nature force a seedling to grow? This is a choice that has to come from an internal place from within a person. To give such advice about sending the police is an example of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result (this of course, is the definition of insanity). Statistics reveal that more than one in 100 adults in the United States have been in jail or prison. This is an all time high. When are we going to realize that this isn't working? Our own fear keeps us in a constricted place, locked in from seeing other alternatives. Fear keeps us in a crazy loop of trying harder, "upping the ante," and driving more consequences in order to get our children to behave and to be compliant. Here is the traditional parenting crazy loop: For young children, we start by picking them up and putting them in the time-out chair. When they get too old to sit in time out, we began removing privileges in order to get them to comply. When this becomes ineffective with a "whatever" response from them, we increase the stakes and ground them for a week. Finally, as teenagers, they realize they have the ability to just leave and run away. Then we call in the big guns and call the police. None of the craziness above is effective in the long-term, and only limited in the short-term. This problem is, love has not been a part of the solution...that is why the crazy loop has continued. If you want to end the cyclical turmoil in a family, put love into action. Unfortunately, many of us have no blueprint for what this looks like, so it challenges us at a deep level to consider that it would actually work. The next time your son runs away (and I also suggest looking closely at the circumstances that led up to this event and determine how much fear from both you and him contributed to the situation), I want you to plan a celebration for his return. Instead of calling the police, call the caterer! Seriously, bake a cake or some cookies. Make a banner that says, "Welcome home, son. We missed you." When a child returns, what we typically do is dump our fear onto the child. Instead of saying, "I was scared for you," we typically say, "How dare you leave this house and not tell us where you were going!" We need to realize that it took a tremendous amount of courage for the child to walk back into that door, knowing the parent was going to lecture him about everything he had done wrong. Put love into action when he walks in the next time. "Son, I'm so glad you're home. We missed you." It takes putting your fear aside and getting down to your core feelings. You did miss him. You are glad he is home. Let him know how special he is in your life. If you've lost these loving feelings towards your child due to the intense dysregulation going on, revisit pictures of when he was younger and when times were calmer and more pleasant. Get yourself back into a loving place with him. Later in the day, take the time to be with your child and listen to him. Talk about what it is that drives him to leave. Really listen to him. Give him space to voice himself. Stay out of being defensive. Know that when he feels heard, he will be able to hear you. When you give him the gift of being understood, you then can take the opportunity to express your fear. "I just get so scared when you leave. When I don't know where you are, I can't do anything to help you at that point. I also can’t do my ultimate job for you as a parent, and that is to keep you safe." Be courageous enough to try something different. You have the capacity to interrupt the negative crazy loop and to change this established pattern with your child. It takes trusting that love never fails.

New Recipient for the Notorious Gold Star

Q: I understand many of the Beyond Consequences principles and the idea of relationship-based parenting resonates with my heart. However, could you please explain more about why I should see my child’s issues as “regulatory” instead of “behavioral” and the neuroscience that supports this concept? A: Yes, I often say, “A child’s issues are not behavioral, they are regulatory,” because we need to parent children at the level of regulation and relationship. This is imperative, especially with a child who experienced childhood trauma, because we can then more deeply address the critical forces within this child that operate at
deeply address the critical forces within this child that operate implicit levels, beyond the exchanges of language, choices, stars, and sticker charts. The brain is growing at a rapid pace the first two years of life. Forty thousand (40,000) new synapses are formed every second in the infant’s brain. This growth and maturation is experience dependent on the social interactions from right-brain to right-brain between the parent and the child. The right brain is dominant for all children during the first two years of life in order to fully receive and interact with these non-verbal visual, tactile, and verbal communications from the parent. Research suggests that the regulatory interactions between the child and parent during these primal years is essential in order for the brain’s synaptic connections to develop normally and for functional brain circuits to be established. The attachment relationship is a major organizer for the brain during these primary years due to its ability to help the infant regulate emotions and states of stress. Additionally, relationships that offer emotional availability from the parent give the child a chance to develop healthy and responsive regulatory systems. An emotionally available parent provides a dyadic interaction that is socially stimulating and rewarding. This attachment communication is dynamic, multi-sensory (facial expression, auditory, verbal, and tactile), and reciprocal. These relationship-based interactions continue to be a driving factor in a child’s development well beyond these primary years. The engaging and safe social interactions in infancy provide the foundation and backdrop needed to later communicate with and understand and successfully read future caretakers. The child’s interpersonal neurobiology continues to crave connection and relationship throughout childhood in order to ensure healthy development into adulthood. However, when much of a child’s early life experiences have activated his fear response system, the child develops a negative and hopeless blueprint rather than a blueprint organized by affection and optimism. Dominant experiences of fear, loss, abandonment, terror, distress, rage, and indifference from the parent create ill-formed neurological pathways. Overwhelming amounts of stress in childhood create a child who is limited in his window of stress tolerance and ability to modulate emotional and affective states. The good news is that children are resilient and plastic. Meaning, a child’s nervous system and neurological pathways have plasticity, the ability to change, adapt, acquire, and create new and improved neurological pathways. It was in the relationship and emotional states of fear and overwhelm that the damage happened so it stands to reason that it is in the relationship and emotional states of safety and love that the repair and healing happens. Interactive repair, or simply, a safe relationship is what it takes. The most important and most effective “behavioral technique” your child needs in order to move him back within the behavioral boundaries of your home is relationship. Too much emphasis has been placed on what behavioral technique should be used or which punishment should be imposed. Well-meaning parents, who do not understand the concept of regulation nor understand the power of the relationship, use behavioral techniques far removed from human relational experiences. These techniques continue to fail over and over, keeping the family in chaos and potentially moving the family into crisis. Historically, when techniques were used and they resulted in behavioral change, the credit was given to the technique itself. Upon closer inspection, however, the question begs to be asked, “Was the technique or the relationship the influencing factor that brought about change?” The credit should not be given to the technique but rather the relationship that is at the heart of the child’s experience. The child values the relationship and changes his behavior in order to ensure his connection. It was the power of the relationship that created change, not the threat that came with the technique. Build the relationship; it is the key. It is the relationship that does the work…that is where real change happens because it is in the right brain-to-right brain experience that children are able to get back on course. More importantly, it is change that brings not only behavioral shifts, but deep healing that permeates to the heart and soul of a child who has experienced pain and vulnerability. (Isn’t that what really deserves that gold star?).

Back to School Success

Q: My son is an angel at school but a terror at home. He was even student of the month last school year. But when he gets home, our home is absolute chaos and he is just nasty to me.

A: Many children work to be 'normal' all day long at school so when they get home, they are exhausted. The result is they collapse into negative behaviors. When they are stressed at school, they hold it together all day long and then in their 'unwinding' of the day, they become "terrors."

Due to early experiences of trauma, children can become sensitive to environmental stressors. Their regulatory systems have been compromised and they have difficulty remaining calm and behaved when faced with the challenges of a school setting.

Additionally, children become fragmented and split between home and school. Many parents report that they literally have two different children in these two different environments. This fragmentation is not healthy to the child's overall development of the self so it is important that this be addressed effectively for the child. 

When we look at the dynamic of the school setting, consider the energy it takes for your child to maintain appropriate behaviors at school is far greater than the average student. He may look well put together externally, but internally, he is running at high speed to ensure he becomes the perfect student. Thus, when he gets home, it is as if he has run a marathon; he is exhausted, unable to hold it together anymore. 

In order to create more balance for your child, consider ways to reduce some of the major stressors he experiences at school:

Social stress - Peer interactions are exceptionally stressful, especially for children who function at a lower emotional level than their peers. Some children may need less social time and more time-in with a regulated adult at the school. 

Transitioning from one activity to another - Transitions such as going from the playground to the classroom, from art to P.E., and from the cafeteria to the classroom, are difficult for many children. Many of the traumatic experiences of children happened around transition, so they are going to be sensitive in this area and may need additional support. 

After school care - Staying at school for an additional hour or two is stressful after a full day of school. Children just need to go home after school. After-school care is typically less structured and less predictable, which is a horrible combination for a child who is already stressed out by this time of the day. 

Teachers - The type of teacher your child has can determine the entire outcome of the child's school year, both positively and negatively. A calm, regulated teacher, who has control of the classroom, well-established boundaries, and reasonable expectations for your child will help your child maintain his own level of regulation during the school day. 

Riding the school bus - If your child is sensitive to loud environments and chaotic social situations, the school bus is not an option. He needs you to take him to school and pick him up from school. Helping your child transition from home to school through a peaceful car ride can set your child up for a successful day. Remember that the number one responsibility you have as a parent is to drop your child off at school as regulated and calm as possible. This gives him at least a fighting chance and a larger window of stress tolerance as he faces a stressful day. 

Stress-inducing requirements - Alternatives that reduce stress instead of increase stress need to be explored and established for your child either through a 504 Plan or an IEP (Individualized Educational Program). Many times it is the small things that can make a huge impact. For example, timed testing can completely throw a child into a stress reaction, impacting your child’s ability to think clearly, and should be avoided. 

Also, just the thought of coming home and doing homework for many children creates a stress reaction. Some families have been able to write into the child's IEP that homework will not be required because it creates too much chaos in the home.

Another major point to consider is that your child's relationships at school are very different from his relationships at home. School relationships are indiscriminate. They don't require close connection, thus they are safer. Close relationships, like parent-child relationships, require intimacy which requires vulnerability. For children with traumatic histories, their trauma happened in the context of close relationships. This sets your child up to be in fear of connection of you, not with the milkman or of teachers, but of you, the person closest to him. 

As you are able to parent within a love-based framework, you are establishing an environment that decreases the threat of this relationship. If you need more examples of how to parent in a loving way while still maintaining rules and boundaries in your home, see my Q&A book, "Dare to Love." Real examples of how to apply the Beyond Consequences principles are given throughout the entire book.         

I also encourage you, as the parent, to check in with yourself. Determine how you are feeling and what messages are swirling around in your mind. It's easy to get into a framework that says to your child, "If you can behave for your teacher at school, then my gosh, I'm your parent...you can certainly behave for me!" 

It's very easy to take it personally and to interpret your child's negative behavior as an attack on you. As a parent, you are working so hard as to help your child, to heal them, and to love him/her. Yet, the reality is that they don't know what to do with the stress from school and they are still living in fear of connection with you. The struggle is not with you; it is with themselves. Continue to go beyond the obvious and reach to the core of the issue---fear and stress. 

Dinnertime Tantrums

				Q: My four-year-old sits down to dinner and says, "I don't like that." He either won't eat at all or won't eat his vegetables. He then gets annoyed, trying to leave the table, whining and refusing to eat. This happens five out of seven nights. How do I respond without consequences?
A: Meal times are clearly a stressful time for not only your child, but for you as well. I'm certain that for you at this point, even the thought of dinnertime creates a stress reaction in you. Create new experiences around food for you and your child (and your entire family). Have your child sit in your lap to eat. Feed him as you would feed a young toddler. Emotionally your child is probably much younger than four years old. Expecting him to be able to sit down at the table during mealtime is probably well beyond his developmental capabilities. You might even consider feeding him from a bottle during mealtimes. He may need you to allow him to regress all the way back to infancy in order to create a fresh start. Children with trauma around food missed some critical experiences that we need to recreate for them. It will give him a stronger foundation from which to grow and reach his full potential. Recognize that his behavior is being driven from fear and that it isn't about him rejecting your efforts as a mother to feed him and nurture him. When he says, "I don't like that!" what he is really saying is, "I'm too stressed out to eat this food right now!" We also need to recognize that we shouldn't eat when we are stressed anyway. Our bodies can't digest the food properly and it can become toxic in our bodies. More importantly, forcing children to eat during this time or giving consequences around food only creates negative food related issues as adults. The refusal to eat vegetables has a direct link to being stressed out. As a human species, we gravitate towards sweets, salts, and fats when we are stressed. What is your regulatory food? Chocolate or broccoli? When we are stressed, we have a difficult time eating vegetables. Think about the last time you were physically sick (where your body was stressed due to illness). Even the thought of eating a salad was enough to make you nauseous. Try feeding your child outside of mealtimes. Small snacks of carrots and celery during the day can provide nutricious intake for your child. Children are more apt to "graze" than they are to sit and eat an entire meal. While dinnertime is an important time for the entire family to come together, realize that expecting your four-year-old to be engaged at this point in his development is only creating a negative experience for everyone. As you gain a deeper understanding of the stress driving your child's behavior, you will find more solutions that work for your family. Stay focused on your child's needs and "listen" to his behavior and there you will find the answers. Keep focused on calming your child's environment around mealtime. This will in turn help your son settle his nervous system which will naturally bring back his appetite and desire to eat. -------------------------------------------------- Q: In many of your articles, you mention that the parent should calm a child down by creating security for the child. I understand that much of a child's stress and fear comes from the threat of being moved to another home. Yet as a foster mom, I can never honestly say, "You are safe. You aren't going anywhere." A: You're absolutely right. You would never want to say this to a foster child because the reality is that they probably would be moving on to another home in the future. Congratulations for being sensitive to giving your child only the truth! What you have working for you is the present moment. The only moment we have guaranteed to us is the moment we are in. Capture this moment with your child. Say to her, "You are safe, honey. You are right here with me now." You can give security and nurturing at that moment. Help your child learn how to stay present with you in this precious space in time. I recently had a foster mother relate a story to me that will help you understand the power of even short term loving relationships. This foster mother had a teenage foster child in her home for a period of only one month. Eight years later, after the child had aged out of the system and was on her own as an adult, she and the foster mother reconnected. The former foster child told this foster mother that the turning point in her life was when she was at her home. The love, safety, security, and acceptance that she was given by this foster mother changed her life and gave this former foster child the ability to move forward. She relayed how this placement, only one month in length, was the best placement she had EVER had. You are an important part of your foster child's journey. Never underestimate the importance of your time with her, whether it is short or long term, and your ability to create safety and security in each moment, despite an uncertain future.