There’s a reason April Beaton has a six-foot-long white beanbag chair in her living room instead of a coffee table; a reason her 5-year-old’s bedroom is empty. There’s a reason she keeps a stack of printouts of the chart she found that shows the overlapping behaviors of children with nine different mental-health diagnoses; she hands them out to teachers, doctors, other parents, anyone else who needs to understand why her son cries every time he’s dropped off at school, freaks out that no one’s picking him up, freaks out when the schedule changes, throws things and runs in circles.
That’s because while Beaton did foster her two now-adopted sons at birth, their minds and behaviors were shaped by early childhood traumas. The insult of being exposed to alcohol and who-knows-what in the womb, no less.
But just as relevant to how her toddler might panic in the grocery store is the fact that he’s been through a traumatic experience that most people would consider a happy ending: adoption.
“When we think about adoption from foster care, we know that there has been significant trauma to the relational attachment system of those children, even if that was in utero or in infancy,” said Jessica Sinarski, an author and clinical supervisor with nearly 20 years of experience in child welfare.
That early childhood trauma affects children on a physiological level. It can cause a child to detach from a caregiver. Or cling to them. Or, in some circumstances, it can cause dangerous behavior: severe emotional disturbances that lead them to set fire to the house, beat up siblings, smash windows, attempt suicide.
“These big behaviors come from a brain that’s in protection mode and doesn’t know how to get the help it needs,” Sinarski said.
The problem is that foster and adoptive parents are largely unaware of how tough it can be – emotionally and financially – to raise a child with a traumatic background.
For families who adopt from the child welfare system, finally signing the papers that turn a child into a son or daughter can be beautiful, fulfilling, and rewarding for everyone. It can also be the beginning of a long and challenging journey. A journey that most families say they were never prepared for.
Trauma creates a blueprint for children’s brains
Children’s brains develop at an astronomical rate. From birth to age 3, 1 million neural connections are formed every second. And when children’s brains form those pathways in an environment of stress, uncertainty, or neglect, they can become programmed to expect and survive those conditions forever.
“We have this naive idea that a child is a passive recipient of experience; the brain just sits there waiting for experience to happen,” said Dr. Charles Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “But it’s an interaction. So when experience changes the brain, the brain interacts with the world in a different way.”
Separation from a biological parent is a negative childhood experience that can create brain differences and change how a child feels, thinks, develops, and acts. And children adopted from foster care, even at a very young age, can exhibit behavioral problems that are often misdiagnosed and misunderstood.
“It’s trauma, it’s prenatal drug exposure. It’s prenatal alcohol exposure, it’s ADHD. It’s developmental delay. Those are all brain injuries. And they’re all competing with each other,” Beaton said. “So what’s causing it? How do you get rid of it? I don’t think you’ll ever know.”
Adoptive parents are not prepared for trauma
If anyone could take a foster child for adoption, it was Ben and Andi Kraker. Andi had worked in foster care licensing and had done a lot of training for new foster parents. By the time the Krakers moved to Michigan, they already had one adopted child.
When they decided to raise the 8-year-old girl they would become, she had already gone through a failed adoption. The couple knew they were in for a challenge. But they still couldn’t imagine how wild it would be to raise her.
“You have a child like that (with severe trauma) and it’s really going to affect every area of your life and you have to be ready for it,” Andi Kraker said. “And I think people just don’t get that.”
The Krakers were not the only adoptive parents who felt that the training they received was inadequate.
Kathalina Goneia worked as a social worker for 14 years before adopting her daughter from the child welfare system. She says both the foster care training and the government-provided induction training were a joke.
“Worse than a joke,” Goneai said. “I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Oh my God, you guys have it all wrong.’”
Beaton recently took the training and said it was enhanced by information about the trauma of the family separation. But she still said she didn’t really know what she was getting into, and the lasting behavioral and developmental effects of trauma and fetal alcohol syndrome weren’t made clear.
But again, she’s not sure it would have made a difference. Many parents approach foster and adopted children with blinders on, she said, hoping for the best.
“We still have a long way to go to help parents understand what’s really going on and what’s needed, and that it’s not going to be a trial and error process,” Sinarski said.
Brains can change, and so can parents
According to Kim Seidel, a parenting expert, therapist and author, most adoptive parents feel incredibly alone. She trains parents in the state who are raising “aliens”: children who have experienced trauma and whose brains are tuned to it.
She teaches them how to raise their children in a way that restores a sense of safety, love and connection, even if it may be at odds with the way they think they should raise their children or how they were raised.
As research into early childhood trauma mounts, revealing its impact on long-term physical and mental health, so too does research into brain plasticity, showing us that even brains wired to survive adversity have the capacity to restructure themselves in new environments.
“You redraw a blueprint,” Seidel said. “You fill in some blank spaces, some blank lines, you erase some parts and create a whole new system.”
‘Superheroes are born from adversity’
Looking at 21-year-old Audrey today, it’s hard to imagine her strangling a child on the playground, cycling in and out of psychiatric wards, or being held against a wall by her adoptive mother until the police arrived.
She was born a drug addict—in worse shape than her twin sister—and spent the first two weeks of her life with her biological mother before being taken away and placed in foster care. Audrey grew up struggling to manage her bipolar disorder, depression, ADHD, and other mood disorders, along with the feelings of anger and abandonment that plagued her as a preteen and teenager.
Janet Sanford has wanted to give up her adopted daughter at times. The time Audrey punched the secretary at the Christian school where Sanford works, for example. The time Audrey called her every name under the sun in a fit of rage when kids broke the rules on the basketball court.
Audrey knew every police officer who worked in Summit Township. By the time she graduated from high school, they had all talked her off the metaphorical edge at some point.
“At some point we’re going to break,” Sanford thought.
But Sanford knew that Audrey’s life depended on her in a very real way. She couldn’t give up on her daughter.
“You have to learn to plead and plead and plead and go to bed crying and get up the next day even though you wanted to quit yesterday, and you have to keep going,” Sanford said.
Over time, Sanford was able to give Audrey what she needed. She found a pediatric mental health professional who connected with Audrey, who has been seeing her for 11 years now. They finally found the right mix and levels of medication.
She planted positive, female role models and mentors in her daughter’s life who would be friends with her, even when her depression and behavior made friendship a hard sell. “I needed people to love her,” Sanford said. “And I needed people to love her when I was having a hard time loving her.”
Sanford has been fostering children for 29 years. She has had 223 children visit her home and has adopted 10. Sanford didn’t have a parent coach to call when she started, but now she is one for Jackson County. She tells prospective foster and adoptive parents to expect them to cry.
Audrey is successful by any measure. She works at a daycare and says she doesn’t have to be a broken person defined by her background. She’d like to be a mother someday.
“I often say that superheroes are born out of adversity,” said Sinarski, the author and longtime clinical supervisor. They are exposed to great hardship and challenge, but someone comes along who provides a safe and secure relationship that changes their trajectory. “That relationship can be powerfully healing.”
Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press. This story was produced with the support of The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.