Kids from hard places often struggle with executive functioning skills, which can lead to frustration for both them and their caregivers. However, through scaffolding—modeling, co-regulation, supervision, and small wins—caregivers can help children gradually develop these skills. While progress is slow, with patience and support, children can strengthen their executive functioning and build confidence in their abilities.
Eye contact is a key part of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), helping to build connection, attachment, and a sense of safety for children from hard places. Scaffolding eye contact gently, using strategies like playful engagement or softening facial expressions, ensures it feels safe rather than intimidating.
Attachment, the emotional bond formed between an infant and caregiver, can be disrupted by early trauma. Caregivers can support healing through professional therapy and intentional activities such as arts and crafts, cooking, and outdoor play, which foster connection and trust. While these activities may not fully restore attachment, they can significantly strengthen relational bonds and promote emotional growth.
Growth mindset means embracing imperfection, normalizing struggle, and valuing the process over results. It’s about practicing in different settings like classrooms, workplaces, and activities. With effort, individuals can see challenges as opportunities for growth and improvement.
Parenting a child that lives in survival mode can be stressful, but a dysregulated child can make for a dysregulated parent if that parent doesn’t have the right frame of mind. However, it is the mindful parent that is aware of their own state (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and so on) that can be calm when a child is facing the chaos of their own traumas.
When life gets stressful, meltdowns can occur. To recover, the body, brain, and spirit needs to get back online for the person and for the people around them.
Kids develop a scarcity mindset as a survival way of thinking designed to promote acquisition of resources in order to stay alive. What can parent do?
What Motivates Stealing among Foster and Adoptive Kids? The answer can help caregivers to make sense of this behavior, and to respond in a compassionate way.
Consequences are not bad. Regulation and relationship are key if kids are going to able to reasonably change their behavior and function better in the future, for the future.
When you hear the word “grief”, it is likely that it is promptly followed by the thought of death, sorrow, or mourning. Perhaps it even conjures memories of lost loved ones and your own personal experiences of loss. What happens, though, when you find yourself experiencing all of the emotions and thoughts characterized by grief, but no one died? Or what if someone was lost due to circumstance that those around you would rather not talk about? You may be enduring what is called disenfranchised grief.
