Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience After Neglect and Trauma
Here is another exceptional resource from Deborah Gray. Nurturing Adoptions is the professional companion and extension to her first book, Attaching in Adoption. It is difficult to find a therapist who has understanding of trauma, trauma, abuse or adoption issues, and understands ways to provide helpful therapy. This is a goldmine of information for the adoption world, for parents and professionals.Nurturing Adoptions is a guide for social workers and psychologists who provide therapy for adopted children and teens suffering from neglect or abuse. This book is a wonderful resource for parents adopting children through the US social services system, from Eastern Europe and older children from other countries. The trauma caused by long years in orphanages, neglect by parents, frequent transitions, and even abuse are well documented in this book. Dr. Gray delves into the myriad ways that children can be affected by adverse circumstances biological, psychological, behavioral, and even moral. She teaches ways to find the child s point of view, and key points of stress, and to help reframe their awareness and behavior into a more positive and adaptive structure, ultimately leading to more balanced and fruitful lives. Dr. Gray s advice is always practical and well researched, but also sympathetic. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in attachment and older child adoption.Alison Martin --Comunity.comSince its publication in 2002, Attaching in Adoption has become a cornerstone of adoption literature. Now Deborah Gray follows up with Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience After Neglect and Trauma. A theoretical, yet practical, guide, Nurturing Adoptions is a vital resource for clinicians, adoption professionals, and parents alike.Drawing on studies conducted by leading neuroscientists, as well as her own therapeutic cases, Gray deftly describes how untreated traumatic stress in infants and children can affect emotional regulation, social responses, memory, attention, and concentration. Gray also hopes that Nurturing Adoptions will serve as a call to action. A generation ago, the majority of adoptions were of newborns. But increasingly, older infants and children are adopted from domestic foster and international placements, and few parents are given much information about neglect or infant trauma, or about the risks of not addressing them, leading to, in Gray s opinion, a growing public health disaster.But one that s not without a solution. Gray beautifully explains the role of attachment in developing internal systems for coping with stress. Using vignettes from case studies, Gray illustrates the roles of parents and therapists in healing hurt children. Destined to become another classic in adoption literature, Nurturing Adoptions is an important, sobering, and, ultimately, hopeful treatise on the impact of early trauma, and the transformative power of therapy and mindful parenting.Reviewed by Heidi Holman, an adoptive mom who s researched and written about the effects of trauma and sensory deprivation --August 2007 issue of Adoptive Families magazineSomeone is finally speaking up about the potential damage of moving a child including an infant too abruptly. In her new book, Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience after Neglect and Trauma, Deborah Gray writes, There is evidence that moving infants abruptly causes a massive disequilibrium in neuroendocrine regulation, with potential for long-term effects. (Dozier, 2006.) For some infants, the effects are immediately apparent, with obvious expressions of grief. Other children seem to transition smoothly by outward appearance. Having witnessed an almost flawless adjustment in my own child, looking back I now believe what I saw was shock. Not surprisingly, it is not possible for children who are in sh --a4everfamily.orgSince its publication in 2002, Attaching in Adoption has become a cornerstone of adoption literature. Now Deborah Gray follows up with Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience After Neglect and Trauma. A theoretical, yet practical, guide, Nurturing Adoptions is a vital resource for clinicians, adoption professionals, and parents alike.Drawing on studies conducted by leading neuroscientists, as well as her own therapeutic cases, Gray deftly describes how untreated traumatic stress in infants and children can affect emotional regulation, social responses, memory, attention, and concentration. Gray also hopes that Nurturing Adoptions will serve as a call to action. A generation ago, the majority of adoptions were of newborns. But increasingly, older infants and children are adopted from domestic foster and international placements, and few parents are given much information about neglect or infant trauma, or about the risks of not addressing them, leading to, in Gray s opinion, a growing public health disaster.But one that s not without a solution. Gray beautifully explains the role of attachment in developing internal systems for coping with stress. Using vignettes from case studies, Gray illustrates the roles of parents and therapists in healing hurt children. Destined to become another classic in adoption literature, Nurturing Adoptions is an important, sobering, and, ultimately, hopeful treatise on the impact of early trauma, and the transformative power of therapy and mindful parenting.Reviewed by Heidi Holman, an adoptive mom who s researched and written about the effects of trauma and sensory deprivation --August 2007 issue of Adoptive Families magazineSomeone is finally speaking up about the potential damage of moving a child including an infant too abruptly. In her new book, Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience after Neglect and Trauma, Deborah Gray writes, There is evidence that moving infants abruptly causes a massive disequilibrium in neuroendocrine regulation, with potential for long-term effects. (Dozier, 2006.) For some infants, the effects are immediately apparent, with obvious expressions of grief. Other children seem to transition smoothly by outward appearance. Having witnessed an almost flawless adjustment in my own child, looking back I now believe what I saw was shock. Not surprisingly, it is not possible for children who are in shock and denial to form a smooth attachment to a new psychological parent, or attachment figure.Gray reports on a 2006 study out of Harvard University showing that over half of the children in foster care leave with an anxiety disorder. They have twice the rate of traumatic stress as compared to Vietnam veterans. Since in therapy, children reference sudden moves as among their most difficult problems when working through grief and shock, one naturally comes to the conclusion that in order to reduce the impact of adoption trauma, one must find a way to transition children less abruptly. Gray explains, Moves that are done abruptly, and especially those that include trauma, lead to pathological or complicated grief, a grief in which there is no completion and children continually mourn, [remaining] highly reactive to reminders of their loss.Nurturing Adoptions includes an entire section dedicated to best practices in moving children with as little damage as possible. Because there are specific damages to the emerging personality when children lose their homes and attachment figures, we recommend that every adoptive parent and professional especially the social workers who are actually involved in decision making read Gray s book, taking particular note of the recommended moving schedule for children. For infants 1-4 months, Gray suggests a transition time of six days, outlining what the role of the adoption parent and the foster parent should be on each day. Infants 5-10 months should be transitioned over ten days.Infants 11-24 months need ten to fourteen days to create a safe transition. Notably, children moved too abruptly at this stage can get locked into [the] protest No stage; or they may feel reluctant to attach again. Gray only briefly touches on something of immense consequence to many families adopting internationally, where children are leaving their foster families between the ages of nine and fifteen months. Typically, the social worker should try not to move children who are in a six-month window of attachment, which is an exclusive stage between about nine and fifteen months of age, â ¦assuming that the baby is in a safe, nurturing, and securely attached relationship with the caregiver. (Our bold.) She goes on to explain that in order to determine whether the baby is in that exclusive window, social workers can note whether the baby usually cries or fusses when the caregiver walks out of the room or has progressed to the stage in which he knows that the caregiver will come back. The potential damage from moving a child between the ages of nine and fifteen months is something that every adoptive professional and parent needs to be aware of.Preschoolers, age 24 months to 5 years, should optimally experience fourteen to twenty-one days in transition. Gray goes on to talk about older children, details of which can be found in the book. For each age level, birth & up, she outlines precisely what parents and foster families need to do on each day of the transitional period. She points out that a less abrupt transitio --a4everfamily.org--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.