There’s a reason April Beaton has a six-foot-tall white ottoman in the living room and no coffee table; a reason her 5-year-old son’s bedroom is empty. There’s a reason she keeps a stack of printouts of the chart she found that shows common behaviors among children with nine different mental health diagnoses; she hands them out to teachers, doctors, other parents, and anyone else who needs to understand why her son can cry every time he’s dropped off at school and panic when no one’s coming to pick him up, panic when the schedule changes, throw things, and run in circles.
That’s because even though Beaton became foster parent to her two now-adopted sons at birth, their minds and behaviors were shaped by early childhood trauma. The insult of being exposed to alcohol and who knows what else in the womb, of course.
But just as relevant to how his preschooler was able to throw a tantrum in the grocery store is the fact that he went through a traumatic experience that most of society considers a happy ending: simply resorting to adoption.
“When we think about foster care adoption, we know that there has been significant trauma to the attachment system for these children, whether it was in utero or in early childhood,” said Jessica Sinarski, an author and clinical supervisor with nearly 20 years of experience in child welfare.
This early childhood trauma affects children on a physiological level. It can cause a child to remain detached from the person who cares for him, or to cling to him. Or, in certain circumstances, it can cause dangerous behavior: serious emotional disturbances that lead him to set fire to the house, to hit his siblings, to break windows, to attempt suicide.
“These big behaviors come from a brain in protective mode that doesn’t know how to get the help it needs,” Sinarski said.
The problem is that foster and adoptive parents are generally unaware of how difficult it is – emotionally and financially – to raise a child who has experienced trauma.
For families adopting outside of the child welfare system, finally signing the papers that change a child to a boy or a girl can be a wonderful, rewarding, and fulfilling experience for everyone involved. It can also be the beginning of a long, difficult journey, one that most families say they were never prepared for.
Trauma creates a template for children’s brains
Children’s brains develop at an astronomical rate. From birth to age 3, 1 million neural connections are formed every second. And when children’s brains form these connections in an environment of stress, insecurity, or neglect, they can be programmed to expect and survive these conditions in perpetuity.
“We have this naive idea that the child is a passive recipient of experiences; the brain waits for experiences to happen,” says Dr. Charles Nelson III, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “But it’s an interaction. So when the experience changes the brain, it then interacts differently with the world.”
Separation from a biological parent is a negative childhood experience that can create brain differences and change the way a child feels, thinks, develops, and acts. And children adopted from foster care, even at a very young age, can exhibit behavioral problems that are often misdiagnosed and misunderstood.
“It’s trauma, it’s prenatal drug exposure, it’s prenatal alcohol exposure, it’s ADHD. It’s developmental delay. It’s all brain damage. And they’re all competing with each other,” Beaton said. “So what’s the cause? How do you get out of it? I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
Adoptive parents are not prepared to deal with trauma
If anyone could have taken a foster child in for adoption, it was Ben and Andi Kraker. Andi had worked in foster care licensing and had provided extensive training to new foster parents. When the Krakers moved to Michigan, they already had an adopted child.
When they decided to take in the 8-year-old girl who would become their daughter, she had already failed in her adoption story. The couple knew they were in for a challenge. But they still couldn’t imagine the hectic life that her role as a parent would entail.
“When you have a child like that (who has suffered severe trauma), it’s really going to impact every aspect of their life and you have to be prepared to deal with it,” Kraker said. “And I think people don’t understand that.”
The Krakers were far from the only adoptive parents who felt the training they received was inadequate.
Kathalina Goneia had already worked as a social worker for 14 years before adopting her daughter into the child welfare system and said the foster care and state-provided foster care training was a joke.
“It’s worse than a joke,” Goneai said. “I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got this all wrong.’”
Beaton took the training more recently and said it improved by including information about the trauma created by family separation. But she said she still didn’t really know what she was getting into, and the lasting behavioral and developmental effects of trauma and fetal alcohol syndrome weren’t clearly explained.
But she’s not sure it would have made a difference. Many parents go into fostering or adoption with blinders on, she said, hoping for the best.
“We still have a long way to go to help parents understand what’s really going on and what’s needed, and to understand that this is not going to be a never-ending experience,” Sinarski said.
Brains can change, parents can too
Most adoptive parents feel incredibly alone, according to Kim Seidel, a parenting expert, therapist and author who trains parents across the state who are raising what she calls “aliens” — children who have experienced trauma and whose brains have been wired accordingly.
She teaches them how to raise their children in a way that restores that sense of security, love and attachment, even if it may be completely contrary to how they think they should raise their children or how they were raised.
Research into early childhood trauma is growing, revealing its long-term consequences for physical and mental health. But research into brain plasticity is also growing, showing that even brains wired to survive adversity have the capacity to readjust to new environments.
“You’re redrawing a plan,” Seidel said. “You’re filling in blanks, blank lines, erasing parts of it and creating a whole new system.”
“Superheroes are born from adversity”
Looking at Audrey, 21, today, it would be hard to imagine her strangling a child in the playground, riding her bike in and out of psychiatric units or being held against the wall by her adoptive mother until the police arrived.
Born a drug addict, she was in worse shape than her twin sister and spent the first two weeks of her life with her biological mother before being removed from the family and placed in foster care. Audrey grew up struggling to manage her bipolar disorder, depression, ADHD and other mood disorders, as well as the feelings of anger and abandonment that plagued her as a preteen and teenager.
Janet Sanford has sometimes wanted to give up on her adopted daughter. The time Audrey hit the secretary at the Christian school where Sanford works, for example. The time Audrey called her names in a fit of rage because the kids weren’t following the rules on the basketball court.
Audrey knew every police officer who worked in Summit Township. By the time she graduated high school, they had all changed her mind at one point or another.
“At some point we’re going to crack,” Sanford thought.
But Sanford knew that Audrey’s life depended on her. She couldn’t abandon her daughter.
“You have to learn to stand up for yourself, advocate for yourself, cry all the way to bed and get up the next day, even if you wanted to quit yesterday, and you have to keep going,” Sanford said.
Over time, Sanford was able to get Audrey what she needed. She found a pediatric mental health professional who responded well to Audrey, who has been with her for 11 years now. They eventually found the right combination and levels of medication.
She planted positive female role models and mentors in her daughter’s life who would be friends with her even when her depression and behavior made friendship a hard sell. “I needed people to like her,” Sanford said. “And I needed people to like her when I had a hard time liking her.”
Sanford has been fostering for 29 years. She has fostered 223 children and adopted 10. Sanford didn’t have a parenting counselor to call when she started, but now she has one for Jackson County. She tells prospective foster and adoptive parents to expect to cry.
Audrey is successful, in every way. She works in a daycare and says she doesn’t need to be a broken person, defined by her past. She would like to be a mother one day.
“I often say that superheroes are born out of adversity,” said Sinarski, an author and veteran clinical supervisor. “They face great hardship and great challenges, but someone comes along and offers them a safe, secure relationship that changes their trajectory. “That relationship can be powerfully therapeutic.”
Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press. This article was produced with the support of The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.