“Toddlers or pre-school-aged children with complex trauma histories are at risk for failing to develop brain capacities necessary for regulating emotions in response to stress. Trauma interferes with the integration of left and right hemisphere brain functioning, such that a child cannot access rational thought in the face of overwhelming emotion. Abused and neglected children are then prone to react with extreme helplessness, confusion, withdrawal, or rage when stressed.”

Sure wish I’d known that many years ago. I had no clue. I was young, in my thirties, with my second adopted sibling group, all four of them acting out, my other four children watching the newcomers with alarm. The first adoption had been an international one in which the three girls had suffered extreme poverty, living in a no running water, dirt floor house…but not going into our American foster care system, instead coming to me with relatively few behavioral issues.

The second group had been in a neglectful birth home, with a confused mentally challenged birth mother, had then been separated and sexually abused in different foster homes, agonized through a disrupted adoption, back to foster care, and later landing in my home disoriented, rageful and emotionally terrorized.

Me, using B.F. Skinner’s behavioral theory, thinking simple-mindedly that logic would prevail? That was the year I’d also met the best caseworker in the world, who later went on to supervise all my adoptions, be my sounding board, re-director of my sometimes convoluted thoughts, confidant, and friend, as I then spent nearly the next 20 years trying to navigate these very treacherous waters that I now write about in adoption blogs.

I’ve changed, re-adjusted my parenting techniques, searched and researched; tossed aside theories and absorbed many others as every single one of my 39 children have had different needs, issues, advantages, disadvantages and positive qualities. This has not been easy, it’s been interesting however, and personally gratifying as my adult children have far surpassed my fairly high expectations.

Still neck deep in raising children, talking and learning from other parents of traumatized children, I have a long road ahead of me in helping my remaining children grow up as successfully as the others. But now, at least, I know it can be done.

Initially I did not comprehend the depth of my children’s pain. I naively assumed that a good family would enable them to quickly recover from their past, that love could, would, should heal everything, and that all would, simply, be well.

Wrong.

That second group, described by my insightful caseworker as” more typical” of waiting children, versus my first group of seemingly easy children taught me a great deal, taught me simply that their coping skills were crippled at the time, improvement came slowly over the next two decades, now those “kids” are 23, 25, 28 and 29. My patience did pay off handsomely.