worn out

Yesterday Mark and I spent some time looking at K.'s KCSL files...legal documents, notes from social workers, family home studies, records of court dates, parental drug and alcohol screenings...it's enough to make your head spin. Sometimes we find clues to her behavior written by former foster families and case workers. I think it's even tougher for her older siblings--K. was neglected, but her older sibs were directly abused. Why weren't the children removed from such an unhealthy environment sooner?

K. has problems with boundaries, like most kids whose attachment is not exactly normal (she was not diagnosed with full-blown Reactive Attachment Disorder, but her RAD-Q indicates "attachment issues".) As others have written in her files, K. "knows NO strangers".

This is typical with disinhibited type RAD, usually shown when in the early years of a child's life there has been a "persistent disregard of the child's basic physical needs". Here is one of many links to more information from e-medicine.com.

So how to teach a child that it is not normal to cling to every person that seems to have a friendly face? While she can seem precocious and charming to strangers, this behavior can be alarming. For starters, I worry that she would walk off with a friendly looking stranger...and in this day and age that could be a fatal mistake. Sometimes she doesn't "get" that family relationships are different from non-family ones. Of course K. hasn't had a normal, consistent family for most of her life, so it's no surprise that she doesn't understand the concept of family.

We recently at a ceremony for a teen at our church who had earned the highest rank in Venturing. After the ceremony friends and family gathered for refreshments. As I looked across the room I saw that K. was cuddling with and clinging to a teenaged girl she barely knew and trying to insert herself into every group of people she met. Of course she was ignoring us all the while.

Some might say that she was just being outgoing, but there was a subtle difference that I wish I could explain better. It's like she was working hard to win over the entire room.

It could be MUCH worse. We know she is on the low end of the problem spectrum, and so our hope for her is that with continued therapy, work, stability and love she will work herself out of these behaviors before hitting those terrible teens! We love her dearly and realize that we have to be patient.