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I have been writing about an adoptive parenting education course that I took over the weekend titled “Because They Waited” by Heart of the Matters Seminars. The four-DVD course takes a detailed look into what affects are commonly seen in adopted children who started their lives in less than optimal circumstances (such as foster care, an orphanage or an abusive or neglectful birth home) and then gives parents practical, hands on advice and strategies that they can use. The course is aimed at adoptive parents with “average” kids; kids who have mild to moderate affects from their early lives.
In my last post I discussed the first module of the course, which was on brain development in babies and young children. The second module builds on the concepts introduced in the brain development topic, and it titled “The Cycles of Need and Unmet Need”.
The first half of this section on cycles of need and unmet need starts with the science behind the topic and then goes in to the parenting strategies recommended for helping children overcome their experiences.
Many people have heard of the cycle of need, where a baby first has a need (either physical or emotional). The baby then ends up in a state of rage (such as screaming and crying), which serves as their “call for help”. In a normal, healthy, optimal parenting situation, at this point a primary caregiver enters the scene and meets the baby’s need in a timely, efficient and nurturing way, which of course leads to the baby feelings better, which then leads to the baby developing a sense of trust that his needs will be met and that he is safe and taken care of.
When the cycle of need is experienced repeatedly, it helps the baby to learn self-regulation, impulse control, cause and effect thinking and empathy.
On the flip side, the cycle of unmet need has a very different outcome. It starts off with the baby having a need and then expressing rage, however in this cycle, there is either no response to the baby’s crying, the response is negative or the response is inadequate. This sets off an “internal alarm” in the child, as he has experienced having a need and then expressed rage, and his need was still not met. Instead of learning to trust that he is cared for, this baby becomes exhausted until the cycle repeats itself.
A chid experiencing repeated cycles of unmet need learn a lack of trust, poor self-regulation, weak cause and effect skills, poor impulse control and a lack of empathy for others.
The parenting advice offered on this topic is for an adoptive parent to be a primary caregiver, which is defined as the person caring for the child for the most amount of time during their waking hours. It is taught that the more time a parent can spend with the child, the better it is.
Other tips I picked up from this topic were:
- Allow regression in your child and encourage dependence. Your child has to learn that he can trust you to meet his needs. This is sometimes called “re-parenting”.
- Independence in children evolves from allowed dependence, meaning that a child will become securely independent once he knows that you will always be there. So allowing and encouraging dependence early on, will actually help your child become more independent as he grows.
- Adoptive parents should expect one month of delay in development for every three months that their child is in care. Keeping this in mind, it is important that adoptive parents parent their child to that adjusted age instead of expecting them to act like what their age is on paper.
- This “gap” between the child’s developmental age and their “paper age” closes over time. t is also important for adoptive parents to remember that the physical gap often closes before the emotional and developmental gap does.
The next topic I will write about from this course is titled, “Tuning Into Your Individual Child”.
Erin, I’m so surprised you did not already have this “head knowledge.” You certainly have successfully demonstrated you have the “heart knowledge” piece of what to do for kids!
Sue,
Well, a lot of this I did know. I definitely knew this part about the cycle of need, etc. (like I said, I did read about eight million books and articles!) I knew some already about the brain development, but definitely learned some in that topic.
The “internal alarms” that I wrote about in the post after this was a new concept for me, and I just really appreciated the very practical parenting advice that was offered.
E
filling in those gaps is certainly a lifelong process. The old addage of – the more I learn the more I realize there is to learn – sort of business.