Sprout These Days
Sprout is doing remarkably well.
I’ll start with school academics. She’s getting retested for speech and OT services but likely won’t need either going forward, and her father and I wholeheartedly agree with those services being dropped. While she continues to be in a 12:1:1 classroom, she’s thriving in it, and we suspect she will be returning to a regular classroom before too long – maybe even next year. Her focus and attention continue to be an issue for her, but she’s reading short sentences of small words and retaining some meaning from the exercise, and at just 6 and starting 1st grade, I can’t ask for more!
Socially she’s on par or ahead of her peers in a lot of ways. She’s a popular kid, and honestly, is a bit of a big fish in her little pond. Kids in the middle and high school know her name, plus of course the elementary school kids know her. We get stopped in public by random bus drivers who have never driven her but know her by name anyway. She stands out from the crowd physically since she’s Asian (one of 4 Asian kids in her school per school statistics) and she’s tiny. Plus, she’s feisty as hell. She gets noticed!
Per her therapist, she’s an intellectual kid. She’ll do everything in her power to understand what’s happening around her, and because of this, she spends a lot of time analyzing and making sense of her peers and their behaviors. It’s serving her well in some respects. Sometimes we see her interacting with kids who are a year or two older and we are shocked at their level of development because we are used to Sprout, who is ahead socially.
There’s a downside, though, to her intellectual bent: she’ll also do everything in her power to avoid feeling feelings. If you’ve ever tried to stuff your emotions you’ll know they have a way of creeping back up on you when you least expect it.
We’ve experienced some night terrors? Maybe? Or at least nighttime crying jags that we can’t explain. She’ll fall asleep as usual but awaken a few hours later crying hysterically and inconsolably. We can’t soothe her and just have to ride out the storm and wait for her to go back to sleep. In the morning, sometimes she’ll remember crying but not remember why, and other times she’ll not remember crying at all.
Those crying jags are hard to witness. We’ve tried everything in our arsenal to soothe her, from firm hugs, to cradling her, to rubbing her back, to playing music. Sometimes deep humming helps if you hold her tight, but that’s about it, and that’s only about 50/50 on efficacy.
There are other times when she’ll become inconsolable when she’s awake, too. Again, sometimes she can identify a reason for her tears, like that another *bleeping* kid picked her up against her will and called her “cute.” That enrages her, and rightly so. But other times she cannot identify why she’s crying at all, let alone so hard.
Of course we discussed the situation with her therapist, and she told us it’s partly because she’s avoiding her feelings when she should be dealing with them, and they’re overcoming her at odd times. She also said developmentally, she’s advanced, but her nervous system is working at about a 3-year-old’s level.
The therapist explained that Sprout experienced so much trauma and (unintentional) neglect in utero and in her first two years that her nervous system wasn’t really developing right during that time. And while Sprout is in a stable, healthy environment now, those nerve pathways are just now making up for that lost time.
As a result, we see some three year old behaviors on occasion. She wants to control the play at all times as means of controlling her environment. Sometimes she throws colossal tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, even though that behavior doesn’t ever get rewarded in our household. And very often she needs to be held and/or snuggled – more than you’d expect in an average six-year-old.
She’s making up for lost time.
As if that’s not enough…
Too, there’s the fact of Sprout’s parents’ traumas, and their parents’ traumas, weighing on her. Epigenetics are the real deal, and while they’re fascinating, they also explain a lot about almost all kids in foster care.
Take, for instance, this study:
Researchers took a bunch of male mice and exposed them to a particular scent (something akin to cherry and almond) while simultaneously exposing them to electric shocks. The mice became super sensitized to that scent, trembling whenever they were exposed to it, because they knew shocks were coming.
But here’s the fascinating part: they bred those mice, but the offspring were never in contact with the mice that had received the shocks. And those offspring? They freaked out when they smelled cherry and almond too, even though they had never been exposed to electric shocks. And the offspring of the offspring? Same thing. For three generations, those mice were petrified of the scent of cherry and almond, just because someone had shocked their great grandfathers during exposure to that scent.
Here’s the study, if you want to read it. It was also mentioned recently in this excellent podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, which is how I found it.
The results were eventually recreated with female mice, and even using in vitro fertilization.
So what does this mean for kids in foster care, and for Sprout in particular? Well, intergenerational trauma is a fact and is often a reason why kids wind up in foster care. Very often the parents of the kids in foster care experienced neglect, abuse, racism, neighborhood violence, or even foster care themselves. It’s not universally true, but it sure is the case much of the time. So the kids in foster care are fighting to overcome their own traumas, and thanks to epigenetics, their parents’ traumas too. And those parents we are quick to blame for their kids being in foster care? They’re weighed down by their own traumatic experiences, and those of their parents and grandparents too.
For Sprout in particular, the intergenerational trauma runs deep deep deep. We’ve talked to her relatives about things they and Sprout’s grandparents have experienced in a war-torn country that has seen very few peaceful years since the British invaded in the 1820s, and especially not since the end of World War II. In their family, there has been poverty, illness and injury that went without treatment, extreme lack of food and clean water, flight from religious persecution, and scraping out an existence in a refugee camp where the locals treated the refugees abominably. I do not doubt the stories and believe the relative has only scratched the surface of the stories of horror in their family.
What can we do with all this knowledge about epigenetics?
For starters, we can give people more grace.
Maybe the person raging at the checkout counter in front of you is indeed a jerk who is privileged and spoiled and exploding because they’re not getting their way. Or maybe they’re behaving like that because their nervous system is primed to jump into “freak out” mode over small triggers we can’t even see.
We can be extra patient with kids who have experienced trauma, and with kids of parents who have experienced trauma, because we can’t always know why their nervous systems are doing what they’re doing. Always try to treat kids with kindness and patience even if you don’t like their behaviors, because you never know what’s happening for them at home now, or what’s happened to their parents before.
Don’t neglect yourself, either. Perhaps it’s most important to start giving extra grace to yourself.
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