My heart goes out to this kid who was abandoned at a babysitter at two-years-old and was in seven foster homes by the time he came to us at five-years-old. We adopted him at six-years-old and gave him a party for his sixth birthday. It shocked him to receive presents for a birthday. It broke my heart to hear that.
Relationships are critical to both approaches. In this article, Kirk offers some exciting ideas to try out in an attempt to help us change from “trying to change our children to be the way we think they ought to be” to entering into their world to understand them better and help our rapport building skills to earn their trust.
So I continue to wonder, why do parents get angry? Why do you yell at your kids even when you know that it doesn’t help or heal? Yes, I understand that if we scare them enough, they might comply, but what happens to the relationship? And why, if we adults can’t control our anger, how can we expect our traumatized kids with faulty wiring and developmental delays to do any better? Worse yet, it is our behaviors that influence our children’s actions more than our words.
