A Day In Our Life With A Rad Child
ivyafire.
Posted to Diary on Sun May 04, 2008 at 08:58:16 PM EST. RSS.
Raising someone else's kids can be challenging. Sometimes you get a little more than you bargained for, such as Reactive Attachment Disorder. Characterized by symptoms such as low self-esteem; needy, clingy or pseudo-independent behavior; inability to deal with stress and adversity; depression; apathy,susceptibility to chronic illness; obsession with food - hordes, gorges, refuses to eat, eats strange things, hides food, lack of self-control; inability to develop and maintain friendships; alienation from parents, caregivers, and other authority figures; aggression and violence; difficulty with genuine trust, intimacy, and affection; lack of empathy, compassion and remorse; negative, hopeless, pessimistic view of self, family and society, behavioral problems at school; speech and language problems; incessant chatter and questions; difficulty learning...in all, a rollercoaster ride of constant attention getting behaviors that seem designed to drive you batty.
The goal? Help them become sane and whole without losing your sanity in the process.
Her alarm goes off at 10 til 6 because every morning she waits until her brother gets into the shower to knock on our door, asking to use our bathroom. She can't use our bathroom because she rifles through cabinets and steals things. Every other alarm in the house goes off at 6, so if she doesn't get up before her brother hits the shower, she has to wait until he's done for her turn. She showers at night because she takes too long and makes everyone late. Every move is carefully planned out to make sure one person doesn't disrupt everyone else's day. Her backpack is already ready for the day, it's checked the night before to avoid the morning crisis of forgotten homework, pencils, books, etc.
It took a year to break the habit of changing clothes several times and missing the bus. For a while we picked out her clothes, then we only let her have 3 outfits at a time in her closet. Finally we allowed her to keep them all, but the first time she throws them all over the room again or makes us late for the school bus, the gestapo rules are in effect again. It sounds extreme, but until you live with a RAD child, you can't understand. It's all about control, and everything you do, from getting out of bed to going to the bathroom is about who is going to control the entire family. Eventually either the parents become authoritarian, or the child becomes a little tyrant who runs the household.
It sucks. We were fairly permissive parents, nonspanking, gave lots of choices. This is completely not the way I wanted to parent. But if you don't, everything you do will be a constant battle. These kids love to argue, or to cause arguments. They lie, they steal, they talk nonsense just for the purpose of annoying those around them. They stall so they can control the time you leave or the amount of time you take to do things. They pretend not to understand things to try to get out of doing chores or schoolwork. They pretend to forget instructions and they lose assignments and belongings. They're accident prone, especially in public, and people observing think you're cruel and unsympathetic when you don't fawn over them because you are the only one who knows it's all an act. They are masters at convincing teachers or counselors they're abused at home, setting up confrontations between officials and parents.
I have had angry words with school bus drivers and principals only to find out an incident my child reported to me one way actually happened another way or that the words repeated to me were never actually said. At one point I was calling attorneys and threatening a lawsuit. The lie grew so large that she actually pointed out supposed attackers in the yearbook. She named names, made all these outrageous claims, it finally came out that it was a fabrication when she named someone who had a verifiable alibi and the whole story came tumbling down around her ears.
There is not a single thing that comes out of her mouth that we can take for granted. Every answer must be double checked for veracity. Because she is indiscriminately affectionate and manipulative, strangers think they are dealing with a sweet, innocent being, so they get sucked into the game before they know it. Every new person you meet becomes a potential enemy. When you have a RAD kid, you get used to acquaintances offering unsolicited advice about your parenting, because manipulative RAD kids love pitting adults against one another for their own entertainment. Nothing pleases them more than to get another mother to accuse you of being abusive, or to get a school official to think you're an uninvolved parent, because that takes the focus off their behavior. It's called triangulating or splitting. It isn't the same as other kids who always ask the 'easy' parent for things they want in a sneaky way, this is done hoping the other parent will find out so it will cause a fight. Teachers and counselors have to stay on their toes as RAD kids get older because they like to make accusations of abuse against them just to watch the sparks fly. They don't give any thought to the consequences of their actions, and often the lies are so implausible it's almost laughable. They have the potential to leave rattle nerves and shattered lives wherever they go.
And then there are the food issues. If you don't want pests in your home, there will be frequent room checks for hoarded food. We've never denied food, and this child has never been starved, yet she hides candy and food in her room constantly. On days school is out every hour she'll ask can I have a snack? I've seen her try to eat pieces of butter or spoonfuls of salad dressing. From food to paper to soap, everything she uses has to be rationed and observed to ensure that it isn't wasted or misused. Before we started timing and occasionally helping with her showers, she was going through a bottle of shampoo a week and a bottle of shower soap a week , and taking a minimum of 1/2 hour per shower while still not getting clean! Now her shampoo is diluted for better foaming and doled out in 3 shampoo doses in a small container, her shower soap is in a pump, (1 pump per shower) and there is a clock in the shower. If the shower takes longer than 15 minutes she loses her IPOD for the evening and the following day. If she wastes the soap, she has to go back to the fruity smelling cheap kid soap from the discount store that goes for $1.99 a bottle.
Of course nothing is fair. She's constantly looking for ways she's been slighted. The world has not been fair to her. She got a lousy start with a drug addicted, disinterested mother who abandoned her. She came into a world where she trusts nobody and expects to get screwed over. She's angry at everyone and everything, thinks she can't trust anyone, but paradoxically thinks somehow that some man is going to rescue her. Even at this early age she's big on the Cinderella fantasy. If there is a book or a movie with a handsome prince and wicked stepmother theme, she's there. She writes poems and songs about how you'll be sorry someday and how she'll be with another man someday. We don't know what the hell she's talking about. We had an incident with a friend's teenaged son being nervous around her when she was 7 because she had a crush on him and he got creeped out by some of her behavior, then she became hostile toward our friend because she imagined this whole scenario in her mind where he was keeping her away from her 'boyfriend.' It was bizarre and disconcerting.
She gets angry that she never gets to have friends over, but she never keeps friends for more than a few weeks because she doesn't relate to people well. It's hard to get her to see that if she'd just stop trying to tell everyone what to do all the time they might want to play more often. Her brother has had the same friends for several years. Sometimes I feel like we punish him for having friends because we're so concerned with not hurting her that we don't let him have company very often. I often feel like the 'normal' kid gets lost in the shuffle because so much energy goes into trying to keep things running smoothly around the RAD kid.
Homework is a hassle. There was 1 year where I foolishly tried to help her. Now, she goes to her room and when she's done I look it over to be sure she followed directions. If she didn't, she does it over. If I get it back and she didn't follow directions, she does it over again. No questions, no arguments, just repetition until she gets the hint. Last week she made the mistake of trying to pass off a book report that she had turned in before. For some reason she didn't think I would remember. We just got a note from her teacher that she has 30 book reports to make up, so I've looked at a few in the past couple of weeks, but it wasn't very likely that I would not recall the summary of this particular book. Ordinarily, she doesn't do homework on the weekends, but for trying to pass off old work instead of doing her homework, essentially lying and cheating, she earned homework for the weekend. Now she'll be 4 book reports closer to the total. We are, of course, the meanest parents in the world.
Before this day is over, I will ask various questions, such as is your room clean? or did you empty the dishwasher? or maybe who left that gum wrapper on the counter?
The answers I receive may be yes (halfheartedly) I forgot (sing song and I'm not buying it) and I dunno. (also halfheartedly and I'm not buying it.)
My response is to make the daily sweep for hoarded food, time to get up and get on that then and uh-huh, throw it away. It never ends. She's hoping I'll get angry, or say something she can argue with, but I'm not biting, I just say things that I can repeat until she grows bored. There are days that my response doesn't matter, she'll argue the color of the sky in the right mood. And then we do the nightly ritual with the after-dinner chores, the shower, getting ready for another day. It's thankless. She doesn't care, and honestly, I don't know if she ever will. I worry that she won't ever be happy, and that mentally she'll never be right. I worry she'll be another dysfunctional adult, a sociopath, a street person, an addict. It's amazing to me how people who trust so little are often the ones who are so easily led. We both have observed the lack of judgment, the seeming inability to see cause and effect. You can't reason with her because she has no logic.
How do you help someone who doesn't give a damn? I've only got 8 more years to try, and then it's just too late. She'll be an adult, and whatever she thinks, or decides to do with her life, she'll be responsible and there won't be anything else I can do. I'm beating my head against a wall trying to make her into a decent human being, who can survive in the real world and think for herself instead of just running around like a rebel without a clue.
I guess it's a case of, grow up hating me all you want, but for god's sake, grow up. Be whole, sane, honest, and as close to normal as possible, please.
I used to wonder about the people I read about who returned the RAD kids to the orphanages and adoption agencies. I thought they must be the most horrible people in the world, to abandon those poor kids like that. Now, I completely understand. I'm not going to leave, but I totally get the urge, and I will never again look down on someone for doing it. Sometimes you have to save yourself, and the rest of your family. I won't, because I'm stubborn as hell, but boy do I get it. That, in a nutshell, is how RAD works. People on the outside only know the history, which is tragic, and think oh, those poor kids. People on the inside know the tragic history and spend every day vacillating between sympathy for the past and anger about the present behavior, and everything you learn about RAD tells you that logic doesn't apply, so what you think would work usually doesn't. At first you feel an overwhelming urge to coddle these kids to make up for the past, but apparently it's the worst thing you can do, they seem to need narrowly defined boundaries to get them to stop the manipulative behavior. It's almost like you have to learn how to be an ultra-hardass to work with them.
For now, I will keep trying, and until 2016 rolls around, I will not admit defeat.
Symptoms of Reactive Attachment Disorder
*Intense control battles, very bossy and argumentative; defiance and anger
*Resists affection on parental terms
*Lack of eye contact, especially with parents - will look into your eyes when lying
*Manipulative - superficially charming and engaging
*Indiscriminately affectionate with strangers
*Poor peer relationships
*Steals
*Lies about the obvious
*Lack of conscience - shows no remorse
*Destructive to property, self and/or others
*Lack of impulse control
*Hypervigilant/Hyperactive
*Learning lags/delays
*Speech and language problems
*Incessant chatter and/or questions
*Inappropriately demanding and/or clingy
*Food issues - hordes, gorges, refuses to eat, eats strange things, hides food
*Fascinated with fire, blood, gore, weapons, evil
*Very concerned about tiny hurts but brushes off big hurts
*Parents appear hostile and angry
*The child was neglected and/or physically abused in the first three years of life
