A local school here has a tradition of handing out daily awards for being caught doing something good. I like that. It's the little stuff even like being caught behaving in the hallway or acting right in the school cafeteria. With my kids, being caught doing anything good is progress.

I try and do that here at home as well. “Good job, Javy” just because he took a load of trash outside to the truck or, “Thanks Dubs, when he picks up dirty socks that someone else slung at the ceiling fan.

I know there’s the whole self-esteem issue going on and the flip side where folks claim we’re raising a bunch of sissies who need to have their every move praised, but I respectfully disagree when it comes to traumatized children who’ve never received any positive feedback in their lives.

At first they even seem suspicious of a compliment, layers of distrust and paranoid clouding their interpretation of social clues that the rest of us immediately understand.

Add in the control issues that grip the kids with instability and defiance, what a mess. Even after all these years I stumble through each day, trying to make the best of difficult circumstances.

Last night most of the kids had gone out back with me and we’d picked several more watermelons for a late evening snack. Bright idea when one lives with bedwetters, but these are really good melons. My 10 year old daughter, who is in some intensive therapy, wanted to pick a fight with someone last night, nobody took the bait so she tried me. Refusing to go to bed, arms crossed, eyes blazing, her younger birth brother, for once, didn’t get sucked in to the drama, so I rewarded his good choices with a second bedtime snack.

Everyone else went to bed, she stood there angry, I wanted to rage my frustration with her at her but I got a grip and walked off, turning off lights, ignoring her defiance, and eventually she understood she had no audience and went to bed.

There’ll be consequences for her disobedience today, more rewards for the three birth brothers who chose to not get involved. Rewards and consequences take a long, long time to sink in, but being a microcosm of real life, kids eventually make the connection, tenuously sometimes, but we call it progress.

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