The good news, the bad news...

Children who are adopted or fostered have usually started their lives in adverse circumstances. The adversity they experience before, during or after birth can have an impact on their development, causing developmental impairments. People who parent these children need to be ready to help the child recover from, or adapt to, such impairments.

Injured by early experiences

The developing body and brain of human babies are very responsive to their environment. Babies are tough and resilient, but they are also in a formative stage, and alterations to their growth will cause alterations in their structure. If adverse circumstances lead to changes in the structure of the developing brain, then the child will think and feel with a different brain from other children. Children can be damaged by their early experiences with injuries that lead to a range of developmental difficulties.

Impairments acquired at such an early and formative stage of life are global in their effects, having an impact on all areas of functioning. Children may find it difficult to regulate their own body, so that it is difficult for them to manage stress and relaxation, or to establish a healthy pattern of sleeping and eating. They may find it difficult to regulate their mood, or to manage their impulses. They may find it difficult to make sense of the world, struggling to make meaning out of the information provided by their senses. They may also find it difficult to connect with or understand feelings in themselves or in other people. If a child is living with these difficulties the whole family will be affected.

Promoting the best educational outcome

Research tells us that being able to manage school and attain good outcomes from education is a key protective factor enabling children with early disadvantages to live satisfying adult lives. Yet it is clear that children living with such developmental impairments are going to find it much more difficult than other children to manage the school environment.

Teachers often do not recognise the particular difficulties faced by adopted and fostered children. It is not easy to see that the child who struggles to regulate themselves and to make sense of the world is not just a naughty child. Moreover, even when teachers do recognise the traumatic origins of the child’s behaviour they are puzzled about how to respond. Schools are set up to meet the educational needs of the whole child population, and the minority of children who have the sort of regulatory and processing difficulties that we are considering can disrupt classes and be very difficult to manage.

Parents who find themselves caring for a child who has difficulty managing their own behaviour and making sense of the world are confronted with three tasks in promoting the best possible educational outcome for their child. They must find a way to help the child manage school, they must take steps to help the school manage the child, and they must ensure that they stay healthy and energised while all that is happening.

Helping your child manage school

Knowledge about this range of developmental impairments is growing every day. Thirty years ago, when we began looking after our large family of permanently fostered children, neither we nor those who supported us had any idea of the nature, extent and persistence of the injuries acquired by children who start their lives in such adverse circumstances. Those 30 years have seen immense advances in theory, research and practice. And as knowledge grows, so do skills and experience to help parents help their children.

The good news is that children can usually be helped to recover from or adapt to such difficulties very well. The bad news is that such recovery is often very slow, and everyone needs great patience and understanding to survive and thrive.

Helping school manage your child

Schools now have targets in relation to improving educational outcomes for children in public care. One effect of such targets is likely to be additional training for teachers in recognising and responding appropriately to problems associated with acquired developmental impairments, which will be of benefit to all such children, and not only those looked after in public care. Every school also has a designated teacher for looked-after children, which means that there should be a named person who has gained the insight to understand the difficulties faced by children who have lived through early adversity.

So the good news is that schools are generally more willing than many were in the past to take the steps they need to in order to serve the best interests of their most needy children. The bad news is that they generally still need a lot of patient input from adoptive and foster parents in order to understand the situation of the child and the family, and to plan effective interventions.

Helping yourself manage

And finally, how are parents to maintain their own health and vitality while all this is going on? It takes a determination to attend to their own needs which is often missing in people who have spent so long focused on the needs of the children. But it is essential to remember that if parents lose their energy, the whole family becomes miserable. It is in the best interests of the child to have a parent who is energetic and happy. So parents need to take time for themselves, to identify activities that relax and energise and to make sure that they keep open opportunities to renew their resources. It is also the responsibility of adoption and fostering agencies, and of the rest of society, to ensure that the people who look after children in need of permanent family care are properly looked after themselves.

Celebrate your child’s resilience

Children are resilient beings. They can achieve remarkable things. Sometimes those achievements are obvious, as children who had been written off educationally go off to university or college. Sometimes they are less obvious to outsiders, but just as worthy of celebration for the child who is beginning to make sense of their world. As one young person with profound difficulties after multiple traumatic experiences said: "I didn’t pass as many exams as other people, but I did get through the whole year without committing suicide. I think that’s an achievement." It was, and we celebrated his courage.

Originally published in the Be My Parent newspaper in May 2004.

This article is published with the kind permission of the people involved. You may download it for your own reference but if you wish to use it for any other purpose, please contact Be My Parent for authorisation: Be My Parent, BAAF, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Telephone: 020 7421 2666/5/4.

Last updated: 14 August 07

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