Loving and Defiant

I'm reading a book right now called Your 6-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant. So far, it's great. It's describing a lot of Sunny's behavior, and even seems to be quoting directly from him! I think this is going to be a great resource to understand how he's processing his new environment.

Here's an example of defiant behavior that's also pretty funny. It shows how imaginative he is.

(After telling him he has to go to the bathroom before he goes to bed, and yes, he has to do this every night, because everyone has to do that, even adults)

"You always have to tell me what to do! You tell me what to do EVERY DAY! And it hurts my feelings when you tell me what to do!"
"But that's what parents do. Mommy ___ used to tell you what to do, and now we tell you what to do. We're only doing it because we love you, because kids need adults to help take care of them."
"Not all parents tell their kids what to do!"
"Oh really? What parents?"
"There are some parents in MEXICO that don't tell their kids what to do!"

I had a great talk with some other parents from my agency (no laissez-faire Mexicans among them, though). One woman was recently placed with a brother and sister almost the same age, and she'd adopted a younger child five years ago... so now she has three eighth-graders. They all get along well and are really nice, well-behaved young people. She says shopping for clothes is a piece of cake. One of them might be babysitting for us later on, after we get through the 100% attention stage with Sunny. They all got certified in CPR in order to qualify for more babysitting jobs.

Another one was Mr. Single Dad with his son, placed about nine months ago, and then a couple from our same training class now have a placement of a sibling group of three. Many of us had great experiences with foster parents, but they didn't. They said their kids' foster mom was rather hands-off and used to keep the kids pacified with huge baskets of Easter candy. Once they realized the baskets wouldn't be forthcoming in their new home, they rioted! Now they've calmed down a lot.

We shared some funny parenting stories, like Sunny's Mexican parents remark. Or the time earlier today, when he informed us that credit cards were made at a factory where they took regular money and ran it through a "flatter" machine that squeezed it into credit card form.

Talking to the woman with the eighth-graders also made me more confident about contact with Sunny's bio mom. That woman restored contact with her childrens' mothers. They are both "still wrapped up in the street life" but she says she's become a mentor to them. I don't know if I can go that far -- that woman is preternaturally calm and commands instant respect; I'm just not as socially skilled. But the benefits of contact are clear. I tried to get Sunny to write a letter, just dictating me a few sentences, but he doesn't have the attention span. He says he wants to, but keeps putting it off. I think it'll be better to just get a card and have him sign it, then enclose an update letter and photo.

It's great to have social occasions where your kind of parenting issues are just baseline normal. At any other kind of gathering, I wouldn't want to go into much detail, because I wouldn't want Sunny to be prejudged and pathologized. But with these other parents, we've already shared so much personal history and raw emotional stuff in our training classes... there's more security.

By the way, I've actually been writing this post over the course of five hours, in between cooking dinner, cleaning and playing with Sunny. I'll get back to reading the book soon.

The gist of it so far is that six-year-olds are beginning to center their world around themselves. Before, the world was centered more around their parents or caregivers. They crave independence, but they're deeply ambiguous about it, because more independence means more separation, and more separation might mean less love. They don't know how much independence they really want, so they keep pushing and pulling. The author says to expect emotional storms that start to die down as seven approaches.

Sunny's emotional storms are extra strong because he's not just testing the boundaries of his own independence: he's testing the boundaries of a whole new family.

The easy part is that they're blowing over quickly. They're as short as five seconds, averaging about twenty seconds, topping out at ten minutes. We can look at each one as an opportunity to prove the stability of his new environment.

The hard part is that he needs our presence so much, after so many other people in his life have gone away, that it's hard to prove his independence by doing things on his own. He can't go off on his own or play by himself because he needs us watching him and being with him constantly. Thank goodness, his need for validation/attention is unfocused enough that he can also fill it using attention from other people, like kids or teachers at the day camp.

We have to work hard at giving him opportunities and saying things like "you get to pick" or "it's up to you" or "it's your job".

I'm imagining that kids with foster care backgrounds are all over the map when it comes to this six-year-old phase. The ones who were parentified must have been forced into independence way too early.

The wonderful part is that Sunny is so vocal about what he wants and needs. He's operating right at the top capacity of his emotional intelligence. He says "hug!" or "kiss!" when he needs a hug or a kiss. He talks about the people he misses. He says "I love you" to us, not in a routine or forced way, but randomly, when he feels like it.