‘Hurt children hurt’ is a truism but hurt children do hurt and though it’s a snappy term it will not quite encapsulate the reality of being hurt from your kid. It echoes those memes that haunt me and Facebook feeds declaring ‘Adopted children develop in your heart not the tummy’. Not really my cup of java, all a little distant and twee from the fact of my adopted family. However, hurt kids is a fact for most adoptive families also it will not fit with the joyful adoption story which purveys ethnic consciousness. That the most vulnerable children lash out and perpetrate violent acts against their parents and carers is the embarrassing fact for society. Violence from children isn’t frequently discussed or a subject to increase company but the truth is it does happen. For many households, the violence of their homes is a continuing and overwhelming trait of their lives.
Obviously we all could love that toddlers have tantrums or that teens sometimes lash out. I am sure we have all looked on as a flustered parent has fought with a kicking and screaming two year old at the local supermarket distraught over something they’re not allowed. I have been that parent, it is not fine, but generally dangerous.
What should you do when are more than mishaps or the normal, though challenging, toddler tantrums? Imagine if it’s violence? Violence that’s daily, unleashed by the slightest perceived provocation, personal and sustained, yelling and hitting, physical and verbal abuse that bruises and injures body and finally mind?
As our family grew we began to experience this type of violence. I composed a site at 2014 about some of our family’s adventures, not accidents or tantrums but sustained bodily assaults which were having a significant effect on us. Admitting that you’re fighting to oversee your child’s behaviour is really a taboo. To acknowledge that you’re fearful of your child or that their violence has reached a strength and frequency that it’s impinging on your ability to function as a household unity is perhaps too much to elongate. I was worried as I published the post, I had checked it with my wife and she agreed that we had to poke our heads over the parapet.
Like a nerve touching, the response was immediate and loud. Comments, tweets and messages all echoing my experience with adoptive parents, carers and foster carers sharing their own stories of violence and assaults. One together with families seeking to share their adventures the stories came after the next for times and days. Drawing these together in a study on the effects of violence on teens, according to a survey I released at the end of this past year, it calms the challenges and adventures that lots of adoptive parents face. There’s limited research into child and that which there’s focuses on teens. Parents advised they had from children as young as four. Hard to imagine but that’s exactly what they said and also the reluctance was compounded by the age of these children.
For many children that have experienced trauma, loss and separation they are wired to react to stressful or challenging situations using a flight, fight or freeze answer. If your child’s response is fight that’s what you’ll need, perhaps not a tantrum however a struggle. It is. Request any adopter exactly what they believe of sticker charts and I guarantee you it will not be pretty.
The majority adopters and were concerned for the welfare of families, their families as well as their children. It was obvious that most were however prepared to be adopters they had never heard the term ‘Child on Parent violence’. If they’d awakened the courage to speak to Social Workers, GPs or educators that they were disbelieved or their worries as ‘normal behaviour’, at worst their ability to parent was questioned. Within the adoption area there is limited study on the prevalence of child on parent violence but what there is suggests it is almost as large as 30% and by the number of parents that contacted me I would have to agree with this figure. There are hints that it might be greater depending on how you measure it or specify child. Regardless, the figure is greater than in the general populace, which is projected at 2 to 4 percent, also raises concerns of the groundwork that we give adults as they come to adopt. With just one in three parents undergoing child on parent violence then we need to construct moral preparation which educates prospective adopters and provides families resources to manage.
Children that are adopted and endangered represent some of their children in the society. They have been hurt and this hurt is beyond what most of us will ever experience, it’s trauma, loss and separation all at some time when they are overly vulnerable. That hurt succeeds in frustration, confusion, fear and grief. That compels them to try and keep their world in an arrangement that stops them being hurt. Violence is occasionally involved by that strategy.
Adoption isn’t a model of caring for children but it’s a model that’s preferred for children that have experienced the aspects of the society. Should we be so surprised that they express their own adventures through violence? Equip and we need to ethically prepare families for this challenge and be sure that our children’s workforce know this hidden phenomenon. Children that are hurt hurt.
source http://www.californiacoastparent.com/hurt-children-hurt-silly-and-child-parent-violence/
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