Parenting Traumatized Children with Developmental Differences: Adoption and Foster Care

Transfiguring Adoption’s Overview:

Parenting Traumatized Children with Developmental Differences provides parents with a short primer in normal childhood development and then illustrates how trauma in early life impacts different areas of a child’s development. Foster and adoptive parents will find this book to be a good jumping off point for figuring out areas in which their children need more support as each chapter details ways in which to tell if your child has a development difference in the areas of sensory regulation, language and communication, emotional regulation, executive functioning, and social information processing. Caregivers will likely find themselves responding with thoughts of, “Oh, that’s why my child does [x]!” For example, we had a child who we felt was often triggered pretty severely and negatively by exercise, and we had our suspicions that it had to do with the child’s body feeling similar to how it would have felt during abuse, but previously, we had never seen this actually explained, which Dr. McLean did in the book. Readers will also develop their own knowledge base in order to better advocate for their child and learn ways to better communicate with others about their child’s developmental differences.

While this book offers general strategies, I found myself wanting more specific ideas to implement. The resource section at the back of the book gives readers places to find more information and interventions for those areas in which their children need help. Many of the resources are free websites, which families will find helpful. Overall, Parenting Traumatized Children with Developmental Differences is helpful and informative, providing an introduction to how and why traumatized children develop differently and how parents can…

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