Parenting Children & Teens with Reactive Attachment Disorder

A major problem with the diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) is the painful truth that many of the very individuals we moms and dads turn to for help - professionals in the mental health, neurological, and medical fields - often lack the knowledge and expertise to treat our kids. One of the first doctors I took my youngster to told me that my youngster would end up institutionalized and that if a PET scan were done on his brain, it would look like Swiss cheese - black holes of non activity where there should be brain activity. That there is nothing much I could do for him as "...these Romanian kids were hopeless cases..." My youngster was 7 years old when I was told this by a prominent neurologist. I didn't believe in giving up. This youngster was my responsibility and I would work hard to figure out how to help him. How I would have loved it if there were professionals willing and able to treat my youngster - who believed in positive change in his l

What happens when the mother reassigns a different motive to the child's cry and decides not to be responsive? A youngster cries for a reason - not to manipulate his parent, not to be mean, or nasty, or to be a "pain in the neck." When, instead of trying to discern what her youngster needs, a mother simply says - "oh, he's just tired," or "he has to deal with sleeping by himself now" - she has given her baby the idea that expressing his inner-self is wrong or bad. A baby is like someone who is quadriplegic. He can't do very much for himself - but that doesn't mean that he isn't thinking and feeling. When the baby cries and his mother responds, the youngster learns to have trust in the world around him and to have trust in himself. When the baby cries and his mother listens, the two join together in a moment of oneness that transcends the separateness, the aloneness, which the baby knows all too well. If the youngster has not