Forums
New posts
Search forums
What's new
New posts
New profile posts
Latest activity
Internet Search
Members
Current visitors
New profile posts
Search profile posts
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
New posts
Search forums
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Forums
Parent Support Forums
General Parenting
Autism Spectrum and Meltdowns
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Marguerite" data-source="post: 367926" data-attributes="member: 1991"><p>Something we tend to forget these days - the chicken or the egg. We look at the correlation between a drug-using mother and a child with problems, but is it necessarily the drugs? Think - why was the mother using drugs in the first place? Why do people take up drugs? Or maybe it wasn't drugs, but simply someone who didn't look after herself well enough, or someone "not the full quid" as we say in Australia.</p><p></p><p>My eldest sister adopted two children with problems. "Deferred adoptions" they were called, because the children were a few months older, they had problems tat needed to be identified and had been removed from their birth mothers. What my sister was told, and what was the reality, did not match. We never found out the full truth but we extrapolated it from the things we observed. Later I met a social worker who knew the case of the younger one who told us thing tat were very different. And those children have gone on to become parents, and the findings we've had in their children also tell us a great deal.</p><p></p><p>Child 1 - my nephew. He arrived at 10 months old, unable to sit without support and unable to crawl. He was wearing a new cotton suit with a blue dummy (pacifier) pinned to his shirt. He didn't know what a the thing was, he'd clearly never had one. When we undressed him (first nappy change) we found that his foreskin was like a trumpet bell - his grandmother had been primary carer and had been of the old school that cleans under an infant's foreskin by rolling it back on itself. There are ways of doing this, and rolling it back is not one of them. Sliding it back is safer. No way was tat kid ever going to have a tight foreskin! Poor kid...</p><p></p><p>My sister had been told that grandma had been left with the baby after her "retarded" daughter had a baby, then took off. Finally grandma couldn't cope any longer (apparently she wasn't the brightest either - well, we could believe that) and relinquished the boy. My sister and brother in law went to collect the baby; the social worker took him sleeping form his grandma's arms and put him sleeping into my sister's. He stayed sleeping in her arms all the way home (no laws back then on child restraints in cars) and only woke up after she brought him inside. The poor darling clung to my sister like a koala and sobbed. But she worked with him, played with him, and within a week he was sitting unaided and crawling. She had been warned that his developmental delay was likely due to a hereditary mental retardation, but he quickly turned out to be a fast learner. His older brother still believed in Santa Claus, and this little boy at age 4 whispered to me, "We won't tell him it's not true." Streetwise.</p><p></p><p>But when it came to learning to read, this boy had problems. His older brother read "Little House on the Prairie" at age 6. This boy at 6 couldn't distinguish between "b" and "d"; "p" and q". He reversed them about 50% of the time. His teacher used to say, "He must know the difference, he gets it right half the time."</p><p>I pointed out that if he COULD tell the difference but mistook it, he would get it wrong 100% of the time. But with a 50:50 option (reversal) then getting it right half the time was purely random. he could not see there WAS a difference.</p><p>I was doing teacher training at the time and so we were fortunate that dyslexia was being talked about. I was able to direct my sister to the right people for my adopted nephew.</p><p></p><p>My nephew was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. We also noted he had poor muscle tone. He was a class clown - if he fell, he fell like a rag doll and rarely even bruised. Other kids would fall and brace themselves, and break bones.</p><p>By this time we were seriously considering that his birth mother's unofficial diagnosis of "mental retardation" may have been due to her inability to read - a hereditary dyslexia. Possibly some in the grandmother too.</p><p>My nephew had a raw deal growing up; his adoptive father was a bully who abused him. Nephew ran away from home and got into drugs, not necessarily in that order. He's clean now, after years of trying to ruin his life, and has about four kids (I've lost count). Of these, my sister is in close contact with two of them, both have ADHD and dyslexia. Both are getting help and doing a lot better than their dad.</p><p></p><p>My adopted niece - she arrived at 7 months, after her third discharge from hospital with malnutrition. It was claimed she was neglected, but her birth parents fought hard to keep her, and the adoption was dragged out for years. The baby was beautiful - clothes hung on her like a supermodel, but she had a bulging tummy. Blonde, blue eyes and beautiful smile. But pasty white skin, you could see the veins in her scalp in stark relief. When my sister held her, the baby would hold her body upright with beautifully straight back. But she wouldn't take her bottle. My sister kept trying to feed her and the baby pushed away. The bottle cooled off and the baby reached for it, but still pushed my sister away. So my sister, against her better judgement, put the baby in the cot with the cold bottle. The baby drank the lot then fell asleep.</p><p>And that was the pattern - the only way this baby would take her bottle,was cold, and if she was in her cot. That said to us that this baby had simply been left, ignored and the malnutrition told us she had not always been fed, either.</p><p></p><p>She grew up bright kid, did well at school but was always very demanding of attention. Jealous of her sister (my sister's natural daughter). Would steal from her sister if she felt she deserved it more. We put tat down to her rough early start.</p><p>I bumped into the social worker in my uni studies, when my niece was about 8 years old. I got more of the story - the parents claimed they never neglected her although the social worker agreed with us, the 'cold bottle" told us a lot (or so we thought). I got family info that didn't tally with what my sister was told. There had also been more hospital visits than my sister had been told.</p><p></p><p>Flash forward. Niece is now in her late 30s, maybe a bit older. She studied early childcare, she has worked for about 20 years in child care. She's smart. She's capable. She has about five kids of her own. Her boys were fine. Then she had a girl. A darling child. But she would scream at feeding time. My niece tried to breastfeed her but couldn't. I remember at a family wedding, easy child 2/difficult child 2 (who is immensely clucky) spent the entire wedding holding this baby. She fed the baby a bottle and the baby took it (much to the mother's surprise, and my sister's). I think it was pure luck, and maybe relaxation. easy child 2/difficult child 2 would have been 12 at the time, which tells me tis baby is now 11 years old.</p><p>My capable, trained niece, with four healthy older children, very nearly lost custody of her daughter. he took the baby to hospital because she wasn't feeding well. The baby was diagnosed with malnutrition. The hospital were very angry with my niece for her 'neglect' of the baby. It was only my sister going to bat for her, telling them of the problems that my niece had as an infant, that made the doctors look deeper. Also those years in between gave us a greater degree of medical diagnostics. The baby turned out to have a metabolic problem which, once diagnosed, was able to be managed with diet.</p><p>My niece now wonders if that was why her own health as an infant was so bad - it wasn't parental neglect after all, but a genetic condition.</p><p>The baby grew out of the metabolic problem, but has turned out to have other learning problems. I believe they have now diagnosed Asperger's.</p><p></p><p>My niece is a very good mother. She is also a very good child care worker. She lives near her adoptive mother and visits often. They are a close family (apart from nephew's time off the rails). She would not be a neglectful or ignorant parent. But she still nearly had her baby taken form her, and we now believe her birth parents had her taken from them possibly unjustly.</p><p></p><p>Drugs can be involved and can do damage to the unborn child, we know that. But there can be bigger, underling problems, reasons for the birth mother to be on drugs in the first place. Or simply other problems which can also connect to the reason the mother became pregnant at all (emotional issues, developmental issues, psychological/neurological issues).</p><p></p><p>Never forget that each of us is a complex mixture of nature and nurture, and nature goes very deep into the genes.</p><p></p><p>Marg</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Marguerite, post: 367926, member: 1991"] Something we tend to forget these days - the chicken or the egg. We look at the correlation between a drug-using mother and a child with problems, but is it necessarily the drugs? Think - why was the mother using drugs in the first place? Why do people take up drugs? Or maybe it wasn't drugs, but simply someone who didn't look after herself well enough, or someone "not the full quid" as we say in Australia. My eldest sister adopted two children with problems. "Deferred adoptions" they were called, because the children were a few months older, they had problems tat needed to be identified and had been removed from their birth mothers. What my sister was told, and what was the reality, did not match. We never found out the full truth but we extrapolated it from the things we observed. Later I met a social worker who knew the case of the younger one who told us thing tat were very different. And those children have gone on to become parents, and the findings we've had in their children also tell us a great deal. Child 1 - my nephew. He arrived at 10 months old, unable to sit without support and unable to crawl. He was wearing a new cotton suit with a blue dummy (pacifier) pinned to his shirt. He didn't know what a the thing was, he'd clearly never had one. When we undressed him (first nappy change) we found that his foreskin was like a trumpet bell - his grandmother had been primary carer and had been of the old school that cleans under an infant's foreskin by rolling it back on itself. There are ways of doing this, and rolling it back is not one of them. Sliding it back is safer. No way was tat kid ever going to have a tight foreskin! Poor kid... My sister had been told that grandma had been left with the baby after her "retarded" daughter had a baby, then took off. Finally grandma couldn't cope any longer (apparently she wasn't the brightest either - well, we could believe that) and relinquished the boy. My sister and brother in law went to collect the baby; the social worker took him sleeping form his grandma's arms and put him sleeping into my sister's. He stayed sleeping in her arms all the way home (no laws back then on child restraints in cars) and only woke up after she brought him inside. The poor darling clung to my sister like a koala and sobbed. But she worked with him, played with him, and within a week he was sitting unaided and crawling. She had been warned that his developmental delay was likely due to a hereditary mental retardation, but he quickly turned out to be a fast learner. His older brother still believed in Santa Claus, and this little boy at age 4 whispered to me, "We won't tell him it's not true." Streetwise. But when it came to learning to read, this boy had problems. His older brother read "Little House on the Prairie" at age 6. This boy at 6 couldn't distinguish between "b" and "d"; "p" and q". He reversed them about 50% of the time. His teacher used to say, "He must know the difference, he gets it right half the time." I pointed out that if he COULD tell the difference but mistook it, he would get it wrong 100% of the time. But with a 50:50 option (reversal) then getting it right half the time was purely random. he could not see there WAS a difference. I was doing teacher training at the time and so we were fortunate that dyslexia was being talked about. I was able to direct my sister to the right people for my adopted nephew. My nephew was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. We also noted he had poor muscle tone. He was a class clown - if he fell, he fell like a rag doll and rarely even bruised. Other kids would fall and brace themselves, and break bones. By this time we were seriously considering that his birth mother's unofficial diagnosis of "mental retardation" may have been due to her inability to read - a hereditary dyslexia. Possibly some in the grandmother too. My nephew had a raw deal growing up; his adoptive father was a bully who abused him. Nephew ran away from home and got into drugs, not necessarily in that order. He's clean now, after years of trying to ruin his life, and has about four kids (I've lost count). Of these, my sister is in close contact with two of them, both have ADHD and dyslexia. Both are getting help and doing a lot better than their dad. My adopted niece - she arrived at 7 months, after her third discharge from hospital with malnutrition. It was claimed she was neglected, but her birth parents fought hard to keep her, and the adoption was dragged out for years. The baby was beautiful - clothes hung on her like a supermodel, but she had a bulging tummy. Blonde, blue eyes and beautiful smile. But pasty white skin, you could see the veins in her scalp in stark relief. When my sister held her, the baby would hold her body upright with beautifully straight back. But she wouldn't take her bottle. My sister kept trying to feed her and the baby pushed away. The bottle cooled off and the baby reached for it, but still pushed my sister away. So my sister, against her better judgement, put the baby in the cot with the cold bottle. The baby drank the lot then fell asleep. And that was the pattern - the only way this baby would take her bottle,was cold, and if she was in her cot. That said to us that this baby had simply been left, ignored and the malnutrition told us she had not always been fed, either. She grew up bright kid, did well at school but was always very demanding of attention. Jealous of her sister (my sister's natural daughter). Would steal from her sister if she felt she deserved it more. We put tat down to her rough early start. I bumped into the social worker in my uni studies, when my niece was about 8 years old. I got more of the story - the parents claimed they never neglected her although the social worker agreed with us, the 'cold bottle" told us a lot (or so we thought). I got family info that didn't tally with what my sister was told. There had also been more hospital visits than my sister had been told. Flash forward. Niece is now in her late 30s, maybe a bit older. She studied early childcare, she has worked for about 20 years in child care. She's smart. She's capable. She has about five kids of her own. Her boys were fine. Then she had a girl. A darling child. But she would scream at feeding time. My niece tried to breastfeed her but couldn't. I remember at a family wedding, easy child 2/difficult child 2 (who is immensely clucky) spent the entire wedding holding this baby. She fed the baby a bottle and the baby took it (much to the mother's surprise, and my sister's). I think it was pure luck, and maybe relaxation. easy child 2/difficult child 2 would have been 12 at the time, which tells me tis baby is now 11 years old. My capable, trained niece, with four healthy older children, very nearly lost custody of her daughter. he took the baby to hospital because she wasn't feeding well. The baby was diagnosed with malnutrition. The hospital were very angry with my niece for her 'neglect' of the baby. It was only my sister going to bat for her, telling them of the problems that my niece had as an infant, that made the doctors look deeper. Also those years in between gave us a greater degree of medical diagnostics. The baby turned out to have a metabolic problem which, once diagnosed, was able to be managed with diet. My niece now wonders if that was why her own health as an infant was so bad - it wasn't parental neglect after all, but a genetic condition. The baby grew out of the metabolic problem, but has turned out to have other learning problems. I believe they have now diagnosed Asperger's. My niece is a very good mother. She is also a very good child care worker. She lives near her adoptive mother and visits often. They are a close family (apart from nephew's time off the rails). She would not be a neglectful or ignorant parent. But she still nearly had her baby taken form her, and we now believe her birth parents had her taken from them possibly unjustly. Drugs can be involved and can do damage to the unborn child, we know that. But there can be bigger, underling problems, reasons for the birth mother to be on drugs in the first place. Or simply other problems which can also connect to the reason the mother became pregnant at all (emotional issues, developmental issues, psychological/neurological issues). Never forget that each of us is a complex mixture of nature and nurture, and nature goes very deep into the genes. Marg [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Forums
Parent Support Forums
General Parenting
Autism Spectrum and Meltdowns
Top