Dancing with a Porcupine: Parenting Wounded Children Without Losing Your Self

You’re a foster parent or you’ve adopted children who’ve already had some years in foster care or spent their crucial early moments in an orphanage. You want so much to help them heal, but here you are at the end of your own rope. The kids are often angry, needy, rude, resentful. In fact, they know too well how to push your buttons.

You feel guilty that, sometimes, you want to just quit. You feel inadequate. How can anyone bear the sadness and pain they’ve gone through and that is now your burden, too?

What can you do? How can you make it through the day? How can you help your kids while also taking care of yourself?

In Dancing with a Porcupine, Jennie Owens shares the compelling story of her struggle to save her own life while caring for three troubled children she and her husband adopted from foster care. How could she stay loving, giving, and forgiving in the midst of a daily battle with children acting out the rage, resentment, and pain of their own traumatic pasts? Is there such a thing as secondary trauma, and if so, what do you do about it? When faith, endurance, and creativity are not enough, what’s next?