Raising Devon

Blog

• 10 Survival Strategies for Summer - As school winds down, many families look forward to beach vacations, summer camps and lazy days. They break out the…
• Understanding the long-term impact of early childhood trauma - Due to trauma during her early development, the lens Kayla viewed the world through was warped. It made even loving caregivers seem unsafe. Situations and people all appeared unpredictable. Kayla likely had no conscious awareness of this and she certainly could not verbalize it.
• Raising a Child with Developmental Trauma - Raising a child with developmental trauma can be incredibly difficult and isolating. The more you understand your child’s trauma history, and learn about the science of trauma and therapeutic parenting, the better equipped you will be to help your child heal.
• Navigating Reactive Attachment Disorder – And Succeeding! - Gina and her husband adopted Maddox only to discover he suffered developmental trauma and was diagnosed with RAD. Through years of therapy and specialized schools he's a successful and well-adjusted teenager with a bright future ahead.
• Surviving and thriving with RAD: In his own words - Jessie Hogsett was diagnosed with RAD at the age of 12 and grew up acting out of the hurt and trauma of his early childhood. He offers invaluable advice to parents of troubled kids.
• Documentary exploring the school-to-prison pipeline - The Kids we Lose is a PBS documentary that explores how ineffective discipline techniques in schools feed the school-to-prison pipeline. It does a great job of showing the severity of the problem, but where are the solutions.
• Aging out of RTF into the real world – a dangerous proposition - For the safety of our kids, who will someday age-out of residential treatment and into the real world – we must find a balance. They’ve got to have effective treatment AND understand that choices have consequences.
• Immigration isn’t the only “system” that’s harmful to children - Regardless of our politics, we can advocate together on behalf of innocent children. Let’s consider that the immigration system isn’t the only “system” that’s harmful to children.
• RTF: A bad option, that’s sometimes the best option - My son Devon was 10-years-old when I dropped him off at a residential treatment facility (RTF) for the first time.…
• A Dangerous Son - This HBO documentary explores the struggle of three moms who are trying to find mental health services for their aggressive…
• Why adoption stories aren’t fairy tales - Adoption finalization is a reason to celebrate. Parents have filled out mountains of paperwork, waited months or years and shed…
• California Looks To Lead Nation In Unraveling Childhood Trauma - Imagine identifying a toxin so potent it could rewire a child’s brain and erode his immune system. A substance that, in high doses, tripled the risk of heart disease and lung cancer and reduced life expectancy by 20 years. And then realizing that tens of millions of American children had been exposed.
• What I Wish People Knew About These Popular Social Media Quotes… - As I like to tell my son, a sneeze is involuntary – stabbing someone with a pencil is not. For families like mine, these popular posts don’t ring true.
• 95% of adoptive parents jump in heart-first, but unprepared - Our recent Facebook poll showed up to 95% of adoptive parents are not sufficiently trained on developmental trauma and the…
• For a determined would-be school shooter, there’s always a way – until we address the underlying causes -  Only a few days ago, I had the opportunity to plant a gun in a school. The doors were unlocked.…