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Creating a Working Alliance with your kid’s teachers

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So if I had to do it all over again, this is how I would do it.

The first thing to do is to get your kid an “Individualized Education Plan” (IEP). This is a written plan, created by the school and approved by you, that describes in a fair amount of detail what the school will do to “accommodate” your kid’s “disability”. (On the term “disability”, see this post.)

To get an IEP in place, start with a parent-teacher conference with your kid’s primary teacher, discuss the issues as you see them, and ask them how to get an IEP.  They might send you around to other meetings with other people, but many kids have IEPs, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get that process started. Key for the IEP is that your kid has a condition that is recognized as a disability, such as Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (ADD/ADHD), something that many kids in the foster care system have.

Once you have that IEP in place, it means the school has extra resources available for your kid from a separate budget, and extra staff, so the teachers don’t necessarily need to do anything extra they won’t get paid for. It also means that you can go to any of your kid’s teachers, mention the IEP, and have a reasonable expectation that they will cooperate with you and the plan.

The central feature of the IEP is an annual meeting where the plan gets written or updated. “Everybody” involved in your kid’s teaching is supposed to be at that meeting, although in my experience, only about half of the teachers tend to show up. (Whether that is a problem for you, you need to decide.)There is also your kid’s case manager (appointed to write the IEP, and make sure it actually gets implemented), perhaps the school psychologist and a representative of the school district.

The typical IEP meeting is very boring and unproductive because it involves lots of forms of paper to fill out, and nobody ever talks about the real issues. I recommend you put your mark on the meeting, and instead use it to educate your kid’s teachers and to get them all on your side. You have them all in a room, and it’s the perfect opportunity. Interestingly, the teachers tend to be really interested in substantive information they hadn’t heard of before, so really good conversations are possible, which then translate into much better results for your kid in the classroom because the teachers had a chance to understand your kid!

The key message is “My (adopted, or foster) kid has had an awful past and had to go through things that no kid should ever have to go through. The ghosts of the past still haunt him every day. I want to work with you so we can help him as much as possible to still be as successful as possible in school.” You don’t need to share many details (and never share any details with anybody that your kid does not want you to share!), just enough that the teachers take notice that it cannot be business as usual with your kid; they need to do something extra.

If your kid is in therapy, involve your therapist. You can ask them to come to the IEP meeting, but that might not be needed. Instead, ask them to write a letter that outlines the diagnosis and the impact that it has on school.

Click here for an example for such a letter.

Then, be specific about what you think your kid needs. The above letter has some ideas that may or may not be appropriate for your kid. Be creative based on what you know does and does not work at home. Also, ask your kid. The more specific you are, the more likely it is that you will get it. Of course, you may have some ideas the school can’t implement, or won’t implement, for whatever reason, so you also need to be reasonable in what can realistically be accomplished. If any of the teachers have additional ideas, embrace those ideas. If an extra idea is any good, all the better, and if it is bad, nobody will continue doing it for long anyway.

Then, determine who is your kid’s champion an their school. It might be the case manager. Work on a good relationship with them and communicate frequently. Some other teachers will not be as interested or committed, and you need an ally in the school that can help you nudge others.

When bad things happen (bad grades, incidents etc …), immediately follow up with the champion and the teacher(s) in question. They are not superhuman; they will have forgotten about the accommodations, or something happened to prevented them from doing what needed doing that day. Don’t necessarily give them a hard time, just always put them on notice that you are there watching and alert and insist that your kid is getting the help they need. Also, always offer to discuss in person and any help you could provide. If you have new ideas, by all means, run them by your champion. While the IEP is supposed to be fixed for a year, nobody with whom you have a working alliance will reject new, good ideas.

Sometimes, some teacher will proactively resist. I recall that one IEP meeting where one teacher bluntly stated “I don’t believe any of this” (right after reading the letter from a PhD therapist). Fortunately, everybody else was on our side, and so the only result was that this particular teacher embarrassed himself in front of his peers. If so, ask the school to put your kid into the classroom of a different teacher. The school psychologist might also be a great ally.

Will all of this perform miracles? No. It’s still a normal school. But it can make life far less stressful for your student, and help them get much better grades while learning that they aren’t a “bad student”, but only one with an extra handicap, which isn’t one if the circumstances are right. This is a very powerful message to your kid in addition to the direct help with education.

The trouble with school

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Sometimes the press writes about foster kids with really difficult backgrounds accomplishing amazing things in school. Those kids probably exist, but there are very few of them, and I have no idea how they do it. It’s much more likely that your kid will have some kind of trouble in school at some point. So let’s continue under that assumption, which seems more realistic to me. (If not, just skip reading this post.)

What kind of trouble? For young kids, it could be “does not play nice”, or “does not obey instructions”, or “talks all the time” or even “walks out of the classroom when he pleases” or “throws a tantrum at the teacher twice a day”. Later, it will be “rarely turns in homework”, “is far behind in math and spelling”,  “is disruptive and keeps others from working”, “seems to have no interest in school”, “pays attention to everything except the teacher” and “does not do the required work at the required level.” In high school, it might be cutting school on a regular basis.

From what I can tell, none of this has anything to do with how intelligent your kid is. Your kid might be the smartest person in school, teachers included, and still fail at what looks like the simplest tasks. Why that is might be a big mystery. If you ask your kid, they might not be able to answer either. If they have an answer, it might be that they don’t do the work because they hate school and school is pointless (because … <<insert some implausible reasoning here, like, say, they are going to join the Foreign Legion>>). If so, don’t believe that for a second. Instead, it likely is that the school provides a kind of environment for learning that works for most kids, but that happens to be the opposite of what your kid needs. So your task as a parent is to change your kid’s learning environment into something that’s more suitable for them.

If the opportunitiy exists, try to find a school that knows how to make kids with a difficult past successful. I’m told that such schools exist, but from what I can tell, they are extremely rare (and likely too far away and possibly unaffordable). If you can’t find a school like that, do the second-best thing, which is to attempt to get your local school to provide the most suitable environment for your kid that they possibly can. It will most definitely make a difference. But that is easier said than done.

If you are residing in the United States, you are in luck, because the law in on your side. (I don’t know about other countries.) The Americans With Disabilities Act requires schools to provide what they call “accommodations” so that disabled kids can have a school experience that is as close as the one of a non-disabled kid. That’s why they have wheel chair ramps everywhere. But your kid is not in a wheel chair, you say? The good news is that doesn’t matter! The law talks about any kind of disability, including a mental or emotional one. This means that if your kid sees a therapist on a regular basis, bingo, the school has to provide “accommodations”.

(A word about the term “disability” is in order. I don’t think of my kids having any kind of “disability”. They have had a difficult past that reaches out to them almost every day, and still makes their lives harder almost every day. But I don’t think of it as a disability. However, I do go to their school and wave the word “disability” around. Why? Because the law says “we shall call this and that by the name ‘disability'”, and when I talk to the teachers, I use the word “disability” like it is typically used with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I would have used a different words if I had written that law, but I didn’t. So if you say “disability” with your school that does not mean you think your kid is “disabled”, only that this law applies to your kid.)

But regardless what some law or other says, there is got to be a will by the school to implement it for your kid. Otherwise you will have to sue, and you really don’t want to do this, because you won’t get what you want anyway before your kid gets too old, the teachers and principals will hate you and your kid even if you win, and you much rather focus your time and attention on your kid instead of lawsuits.

The trick is to build a “working alliance” with your kid’s teachers. Almost all teachers originally got into teaching because they actually want to do something good for kids, so even if a teacher has become old and cynical, that desire likely is still there somewhere. It is your task to find it, connect to it, be very specific about what help you think your kid needs, and then help the teachers provide it. As unlikely as it sounds, most teachers do not understand the first thing about kids with a difficult past (judging from the dozens of teachers we have interacted with over the years in several different schools). So you need to teach them, and hold their hand if needed once they try out this new thing that they have never done before. Another reason why “working alliance” works much better than a confrontational approach.

In the next post, I’ll be specific about how to do this.

The “real” parents

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Your kid’s teachers might say it. Your neighbors and friends might say it. Your kid might say it (particularly if he is upset at you). And even you might say “your real parents” when referring to your kid’s old family. The ones that your kid could not stay with because it wasn’t safe for him.

If they are the “real” parents, what does that make you and your partner, if you are in this together? Fake parents? Pretend parents? People who may be somebody or something, but certainly not “real” parents? Does that accurately describe you?

Of you course some people believe there’s those people whose chromosomes your kid carries, and those are her parents, and nobody else is a parent. If you hang out only with biologists, that’s probably true. So all those parents who remarried aren’t real parents, and those dads who never found out that the kid wasn’t their biological child aren’t real parents, and all those parents who dried the tears and worried all night and made the boo boo go away … they aren’t real parents?

Really? Are you kidding me? This makes no sense to me.

Here’s what I think:

If it walks like a parent, and it talks like a parent, and quaks like a parent, and it stays up all night if needed like a parent, and it goes to battle with the school or the neighbors or the doctors or whoever like a parent, and is ignored by the kid like the furniture is because the furniture is always going to be there and boring boring boring, like a parent, it must be a parent. And: if somebody does not walk like a parent, and does not talk like a parent, and does not quak like a parent, and does not go to battle like a parent, and is not being ignored like the furniture is being ignored because it is so boringly always there, like a parent, they are not a parent, the chromosomes be damned. Just a few generations ago we didn’t even know about chromosomes.

Parent is a job description, not something you become just because you had sex once.

There’s a second point, however, that’s harder. For me, the title “parent” is one that has to be earned. It is not bestowed, not because of the chromosomes, or because of giving birth, or the sex, or because some judge or social worker said so. You are only a parent if you do the job of a parent, as well as you possibly can.

The best judge of whether you have earned the title “parent” is your kid. Your kid — in particular if she had a difficult past — is going to notice if you are doing a good job as a parent, and they will tell you. Of course it depends on the age. (Elementary-school age is easiest, before that they aren’t quite grown up enough to understand the concept of parenting, and after that life becomes more complicated.) Maybe they will say “you are a great parent” (but that is unlikely). More likely they will use different words (like “I love you”), or tell you without words, such as with a present (“This rock is very special and I want to give it to you”) or with a smile (you will know when you see it).

There are those times when your kid will tell you, in their own special way, that they realize you are being their parent, and that it is special to them that you are their parent, and that they are so glad you are their parent, and that they accept and consent and approve to you being their parent, and what in the world did they do to deserve you as a parent, and what world of hurt they would be in if you weren’t their parent, and they appreciate it more than they could ever tell you or acknowledge to you or anybody. It probably won’t happen very often. It might be a very fleeting moment, gone in an instant. But if you do your job, they will. (It is the most powerful form of approval you will ever get from anybody in your life. Who cares whether your boss likes you or you got good grades or some award? Earned, and voluntary appreciation from a kid who was put into your house against their will, probably, is something else entirely.)

Maybe they will have a “real” parent some other time. Maybe they already had a “real” parent for some time in the past. Maybe they will be very, very lucky, and have several “real” parents in their lifetime. But right now, you are, and don’t let anybody else tell you otherwise.

Your kid’s personal space

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Good parents and their kids tend to be very comfortable being physically close to each other. They exchange lots of hugs and perhaps kisses, of course depending on the age of the kid. A quick pat on the shoulder or the head happens all the time. Fooling around with lots of physical touch (like playing horsee, or tickling) is a favorite of many kids, and their parents.

That may not be true for kids with a difficult past. In fact, it may be the opposite, for two reasons: attachment issues, and past trauma.

Let’s talk about the trauma first. Imagine you have been severely beaten, again and again, by a previous “parent” (such as a birth parent or their boyfriend). Now this new parent, while horsing around, grabs your arm and pulls you close. Although you are having a great time right now, your brain instantly recalls events in the past that were similar: your old parent always used to pull you close just like that, and a severe beating followed. Depending on the severity of the trauma, the kid may end up with a full-fledged panic attack within seconds, and you, the parent, will completely at loss what just happened. (You can’t find out from the kid because they likely won’t be able to talk about the trauma.)

Here’s another example: you pull your kid on your lap, perhaps like you have done many times before. This time, however, the kid goes rigid and starts sweating. What you may not know is that sexual abuse in the past started with the abuser having the kid sit on their lap, and this time, the memory suddenly popped up and took over your kid’s entire consciousness. Oops. (I’ll have more to say about how trauma recall looks like in children, and how to deal with it in a future post.)

You may have heard from the social workers what kind of maltreatment the kid was exposed to in the past. However, very rarely do social workers know the whole story, so a lot more bad things might have happened than they know. And of course they don’t know the details. So it’s very unlikely that you will be able to avoid triggers just by avoiding what the social workers told you.

What can you do about it?

  • First of all, be aware: if the kid suddenly withdraws, or completely overreacts (in your view) to a physical movement you made, you might have triggered a traumatic memory.
  • Once a traumatic memory has been triggered, do not make it worse. In other words, give the kid plenty of space. No touching, no hugging: it will not help the kid feel better but instead increase the recall and make them feel even worse! If the kid wants to hide in their room or behind the couch, let them. They need to re-establish safety, and that means, for a time, to be away from people who are associated with the trauma, or the trigger (that includes you)
  • As soon as the kid is receptive, apologize profusely. “I’m very sorry that I pulled you on my lap, I saw that this was really scary for you, and I really don’t want to scare you. I’m so sorry that happened, and I will try hard not to do it again. If I ever do something that really scares you, could you tell me so I won’t do it, because I want you to be happy not scared.”

And then there is attachment. Pretty much all kids whose childhood was disrupted have attachment issues or full-fledged reactive attachment disorder (RAD). One of the consequences of this is that they will have a lot of negative emotions about physical contact, particularly with a parent. You may notice this if the kid never really seems to want to be close to you, gets up when you sit down next to them and things like that. There is nothing wrong with you, it’s just one of the signs of attachment issues that the kid has from the time before they were with you.

There are many approaches to attachment therapy, some of them highly controversial (if you do a web search, you can find plenty of scary stories ). But there are also rather good attachment therapies and therapists. Once you are in phase 3 or 4 of your relationship with your kid, I strongly recommend you find a therapist who has had specialized attachment training, and work with them. It will be beneficial for your kid, and probably for you as well (all attachment therapy includes the parent in every session) as it will help improve the emotional relationship between you and the kid. It requires a therapist who has had specialized attachment training; this is not taught in regular therapy curricula and I doubt that it is something they can pick up on their own without training.

What this all means is that you need to give your kid plenty of space. We don’t think of kids, particularly little kids, as having any kind of “personal space” with respect to the parent. But for our kids, we need to. Make sure the kid is permitting you to enter their personal space, particularly if your relationship to the kid is fairly new. You really want to avoid triggering trauma recall, and you don’t want the kid to associate the negative feelings they have when somebody comes too close with you either, due to attachment issues. However, when the opportunity presents itself, by all means have as much touch and physical closeness with your kid as possible. Touch actually helps reduce attachment issues — if it can be done without triggering the kid. Cuddling on the couch while watching a movie sometimes is a good situation to try.

This is also important as part of the message you want to send to the kid that you are safe. If they know that you respect their personal safety zone, they will have more confidence that you will not suddenly do bad things to them. Which may be a new experience for some kids who have never been in a place where they were safe.

 

Your kid’s psychological diagnoses

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One of those questions that courts and social workers ask is this: “Is the kid in therapy?” The correct answer is: “Yes”, and they will go away happy. Unfortunately, while that will make them happy, chances are, unless you are very lucky or drive it yourself, it will make very little difference in your and your kid’s life, and sometimes makes things worse (yes, it happens).

This sounds harsh, but is my experience over something like more than a dozen therapists and psychiatrists in the course of a dozen years, some with PhDs and all. Now, I don’t want to put down therapists and their profession. It’s just that there is no miracle dust called “therapy” — if you sprinkle it all over your kid, everything will be fine. That would be nice, but it ain’t so. What a therapist can and cannot do will be a separate upcoming post, but before we get there, let’s look at what problems your kid might have that a therapist might be able to help with. And to get that started, let’s look at the salad of strange psychological terms that will be used by therapists (and your kid’s school) as their “diagnosis” for your kid:

  • First, there is the all-around catch-all diagnosis: “ADHD”/”ADD” (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) and perhaps other variations of the basic idea. Chances are very good your kid will be diagnosed as having ADHD at some point or other. What does that mean for the kind of kids with a difficult past that we have? As the very first child therapist we saw explained, and I totally agree, it means “The adults want the kid to sit and be quiet and focus on something we tell them to do, but the kid fidgets, or runs around, or talks loudly, or does something else, and the kid won’t stop, regardless what we adults do.” I would call it “We don’t have any clue what is going on with this kid, and so we call it ADHD”. Usually what follows is prescription tranquilizers, without having any idea what’s going on. I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, your takeaway is two points: 1) in your personal life, forget about ADHD, whether your kid does or does not have that diagnosis will not change what you do so there is no point spending any extra time on it, 2) in schools that are subject to the American With Disabilities Act (i.e. US schools) or something similar in other countries, you can use an ADHD diagnosis as your lever to get special services for your kid. It’s something schools know how to deal with bureacratically, and so using it makes your job a lot easier to get the school to do the best they can for your kid.
  • Attachment disorder/reactive attachment disorder/RAD. This is a given for any kid who has been removed from their birth parents for any period of time. You can read up smart writings about it, but the essence is very simple: Kids need the uninterrupted emotional connection to their birth parents, and bad things happen to their mind and their soul if they don’t have that all the time. Your foster kid, by definition, does not have that, otherwise they wouldn’t be in your home. If there is a single diagnosis you want to spend your time on researching, this is it.
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If a terrorist captures you and threatens to kill you and your family, you get PTSD. Even if you get out, you probably will have nightmares for a long time, and get easily rattled during the day, among other problems. Your kid is like that, except probably worse: instead of a single traumatic event, your kid will likely have experienced many over a number of years: from abuse and neglect to the removal from a birth home (a very traumatic event in itself) or separation from siblings. Also, because they were little when it happened, they could not explain what happened to themselves as you can, and so it is even more overwhelming to them than it would be to you.

These three apply to most (all IMHO) foster kids, regardless of their particular history. There can be others, of course, such as frequently seen:

  • Fetal alcohol syndrome/FAS: the damage that was done by the birth mother consuming, possibly large, amounts of alcohol during pregnancy.  I know little about that.
  • Depression. If everything had happened to you that happened to your little one, do you think you would not be depressed? Enough said, of course they are depressed! Chances are that if you are doing a good job as a parent, and work on the other items in this post, the depression will go away on its own.
  • Anxiety disorders. If you don’t know in whose bed you will wake up in the morning, and you totally depend on adult strangers who may or may not be nice people, would you be anxious? Duh. Your being a committed parent is the first-line remedy here.
  • Somatic issues. Your kid reports all kinds of pains and disease symptoms, but you and the doctor see no sign of illness. The short version: your kid is in emotional pain (duh! of course they are!) and asks you to help. You don’t need to do any miracles, just emphatically acknowledge that the kid is in pain, and that you are there for them. (No, you won’t do all/most of what the kid wants you to do to fix it, but you are very emotionally available, that will be a better fix)

If your kid is being diagnosed with any of the following, it is time for you to perk up your eyes and ears and be very attentive about whether that’s really that. If a therapist diagnoses any of those, I would immediately find a second and/or third opinion of a therapist who has substantial experience working with abused and neglected children.  (Interview them! Ask for whether more than 50% of the patients they see are kids with an abuse/neglect background, and spend no time or attention on those who do not. Our kids are a different ballpark.) With one of those diagnoses, the danger is that your kid gets labeled, and people — perhaps you included — stop seeing the world from the eyes of the kid. And I really don’t want you to do that because the diagnosis may very well not be correct. So here’s my list:

  • Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic-depressive disorder. The basic symptoms are that your kid sometimes is completely hyper, and cannot be stopped, and some other times completely lethargic and cannot be cajoled to do anything. The trouble with this diagnosis is that neither you nor your therapist can tell whether there is truly a “chemical imbalance in the brain” or it’s basically PTSD that your kid is trying to manage by distracting themselves really hard from their bad memories. It may be so, or it may not be. The standard “treatment” is medication, and you want to avoid that if it isn’t actually bipolar disorder.
  • Oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, etc. Personally I have my doubts that these disorders really exist for anybody, but even if they do for grown adults, they do not for little children. Lack of parenting disorder may be a better way of looking at it, and you are the expert on fixing it. I’m not kidding.

As your kid gets older, you may encounter:

  • Sexual acting out. Way too much sex with way too many partners, perhaps of both sexes, without ever establishing much of a relationship. In-your-face sexuality, etc. etc. This is just the teenage version of everything I wrote about above. Try to keep the kid as safe from pregnancy, diseases, and bad relationships as you can, but never risk the connection that you have to the kid. You will not be able to influence their behavior at all if the relationships cracks, so don’t let that happen.
  • Alcohol and substance abuse. I don’t have any experience with that. I would get lots of professional advice, but focus my own actions on building and strengthening the relationship to the kid.
  • Truancy, perhaps petty theft or worse. Chances are the kid does this due to the cameraderie (to compensate for Attachment and self-worth issues), the “respect” from peers, and because they have little appreciation just how badly these things can mess up their life. They may also think they will never have a life and die young, so why care. Again, make clear what you stand for in life, and that you will always love them, regardless of what they might do in life.

Finally, this is not something therapists usually label as a diagnosis, but I might as well add it:

  • Incredibly low sense of self and self-esteem. Image you say “I want …” to an abusive parent, and get praise for asserting your own wishes. It is hard to imagine. So it’s difficult for abused kids to start developing a healthy sense of self. This comes out in a thousand ways, including looking like depression. Why doesn’t this kid get out of bed and play soccer with all the other kids in the park? It may be they are depressed; it may also be they cannot imagine being just like the other kids, doing what kids do, because they aren’t worth what other kids are worth. Your basic intervention is to take every opportunity to be amazed at something your kid did, like the amazingly beautiful paintings they bring home from school, or that they lined up the toy cars in a line! How amazing they are to do that! It will take a long time, but you are in a better position than anybody to do something about it.

Like about almost anything else. Which is, of course, why you are doing this in the first place.