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acceptance, adoption, anxiety, attachment issues, brain training, child abuse, Family, family life, family time, fear, foster care, frustration, HOME, parenting, perspective, philosiphy, psychological impact of adoption, raising kids, scary questions, therapy

Learning How to See Family

How does your child see you?
How does your child see you?
When it comes to perspective, I am not sure there is a single perspective more powerful than how we ourselves. However if there is one, I bet it is how we think others see us. Do they see all of our failings or our strengths? Do they see us as worthy of love?

Over the weekend, J and I took a hit in the how we think we are viewed by our kids. Our son,O, ran away. It started off as his usual morning defiance, riling up his younger sister and refusing to do the normal morning routine. He thought we would chase him down and force him to do it. So when I told him I had our foster baby in my arms because I was feeding him and there would be consequences if I had to go get him, he said “Make me.” After another minute of him dancing around, I put down R, and I went to go get him. He was waiting by the door which he opened with a smile towards me when he knew I could see him. He ran out into a down poor of rain. I texted J, and we thought his attempt to get attention shouldn’t work. He would come right back. After all, he wasn’t even wearing shoes.

He did not come back. He ran and 20 minutes later while J was out looking for him, he got into a stranger’s car. He told them he did not want to come home because his mom “mistreats him.” He was so lucky, because the older couple took him to the police station. The woman fell carrying our shoeless son into the police station treating him like the brave abused boy he was portraying himself. The cops heard he was “mistreated at home” and there were two other girls and a foster baby in the home. The cops took him to the hospital for an exam and to take photo’s of the bruises on his body as evidence of his abuse.

Of course by this time, I have called the police department giving his name and description trying to get their help to find him. After we had heard nothing for another 30 minutes, I called them back. They said a car was in route to my house. Two cops came in and asked if they could search the house. I replied, “Sure, I have looked everywhere in case he snuck back in somehow, and we have had a neighbor who does searches for the police over to look already, but the more eyes the better.” At this point, we have most of our street looking for him with phone calls out to all of the friends we could think he might try to reach. When they called back in, they said another cop was on the way to our house, their commander. When he got there is when I got the phone call saying O was safe at the precinct, but he was on the way to the hospital for an exam. We were relieved, and J wanted to go be with him, but we were asked to stay at home for questioning.

They took pictures of his bruises, none of which were from us. Wrestling on a trampoline with a kid who outweighs you by 30% will do that as will falling from the lip of a bathtub he was dancing on for his sister’s giggles. As I spoke with the ER doctor, I felt his hostility towards me grow steadily less when I explained his diagnoses and medications. Even though the doctor and Child Protective Services agent believed me, we still had to wait for him to come home and find out if there will be an investigation effectively ending our ability to foster children.

Now O had no idea the ramifications of what he was doing. He started off afraid of being yelled at again for misbehaving. Then it was a fear of being yelled at for running outside, and when I didn’t chase him he worried more. Fear drove him to act and then exaggerate. When the cops said they were going to go get the other kids in his house, he was happy. It never occurred to him that did not mean they would be with him in a new home. He just did not want to be yelled at again. When we questioned him about the ordeal that night, we had to be extremely careful with the wording of questions, because he was searching to say only what he thought we wanted to hear. He was still scared to the point he would have agreed to leave our house because he felt scared there.

I know his very early childhood before us was hard, but will he always be this scared? Will he always act impulsively to better his immediate situation without understanding how others perceive his actions and the motivation for them?

If one reads the Atlantic this month, it would seem likely. The article, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will, argues our thought process is predetermined by chemicals in our brains and the neural paths signals can take. Science seems to be arguing the nature side of the nature vs. nurture is the better bet for predicting and explaining actions. I buy the science behind the article, but I think it is too static. Sure we can predict/explain a behavior or action by looking at the brains pathways, but over time are we explaining the actions or the predispositions to certain actions?

Atlantic, There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

Can we change the brain process over time? Is this self determinism or free will changing the determinism?

Having seen Ericksonian hypnotherapy work, I also question how fixed these predetermined thoughts, reactions and emotions are to given stimuli. Can we not change how our brains work? If we can decide to change these paths, then the predictive value of the determinist model would seem to fall apart. Granted, one may say the decision to change was predictable, but were the situations to allow us to do so also predictable?

Family, it does a soul good. The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.
Family, it does a soul good. The next step is teaching our body to react to this truth.

Raising kids who have gone through trauma but still have highly malleable brains, I have to hope the nurture model can help. Maybe I am but a part of the masses needing to be gullible, but I tend to think the brain was wired to make this choice and do this action is believable only in a specific static scenario. My brain, as it is right now, will always decide A if given a choice between A and B. However, I might train to look at both choices and sometimes choose B based on a different decision model. My thought processes are not carved in stone, and I hope my neuro paths are not either…though a bit more resistance to cuts of those paths would be nice (Sorry, bad MS joke since Multple sclerosis, which I have, means many cuts).

Could we not plausibly argue the brain paths simply predispose us to a course of action or thought at a given time under given circumstances? Can we then work to narrow the range of circumstances prompting the bad reactions and broaden the number of paths to the preferred outcome? If not, then why bother with parenting?

Side note: The highlight of my week came when I heard O tried to calm a girl in his class using what I had taught him. I have been working with him to be the candle giving a soft glow rather than an inferno burning everything to ash. It was all based on a nintendo Wii game where you have to sit perfectly still. We started saying to each other, “Be the candle, not an inferno.” Of course for me, the candle is my grandfather’s torch of my dreams.

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brain training, MS medication, risk management, teaching kids how to think, Tysabri, Uncategorized

“One, Two, Many, Lots, and Whole Bunches!” – Life in a Base 100 World

I have always been told we use a base ten numbering system. I maintain we are a base ten times ten when it comes to absorbing the meaning of numbers.
I have always been told we use a base ten numbering system. I maintain we are a base ten times ten when it comes to absorbing the meaning of numbers.

There seems to be a logical disconnect in our brains when it comes to very large numbers. We have ten fingers and ten toes. We are fine counting to ten. When it comes to counting to 100, we don’t have big problem either. However, I note that I can put myself to sleep counting down from 100 by “1’s” or “2.5’s.” One hundred seems a natural barrier, and because we are a tens based society, ten times our natural barrier is still comprehendible. However, as we go further from hundreds our understanding of scale diminishes. When we start counting in thousands, we may as well go back to the childhood counting, saying “One, two, many, lots, and whole bunches!”

We can intellectually go beyond a thousand, but I note that when we do, we group things so that we are counting the groups again, never going beyond the hundreds. For example, 530,253,063 is said “five hundred thiry million, two hundred fifty-three thousand, and sixty-three.” We have kept our counting to the hundreds of a group. That seems a natural cognitive limit of our intuitive understanding.

I think this inability to think beyond hundreds inhibits some of our intuitive understanding of scale. I see this all the time even amongst those of us dealing with numbers all the time. At my work, a group of us play the lottery when the winnings are big enough for all of us to retire. We call it the “stupid people’s tax” because we all know the expected return for our money is nothing and we pay anyway. The odds of one in hundreds of millions feels like one in hundreds with the millions only understood intellectually.

It is with this in mind that I read much of the news about the Syrian refugees. I see reports where countries take in thousands or even tens of thousands, and it feels impressive for some group to advocate increasing the number of refugees from one thousand to ten thousand. It feels like the group advocating for ten thousand is much more heroic. I submit this thinking is at least partially the result of our inability to comprehend the number of refugees is estimated at 10.8 million. Again, we focused on the wrong parts when thinking about the scale of the crisis. Like the examples above, we thought about the numbers I underlined instead of the description after them. It is very hard to get to 10.8 million (number of refugees) when we are dealing with them a thousand to maybe ten thousand at a time. When I think about the true scale of the problem, it feels like the responses are akin to trying to put out California forest fires with one spoon full of water at a time. Some may bring the teaspoon while others bring a ladle, but how effective are either?

Don’t take this wrong, our minds inability to grasp large numbers has advantages. I take a drug that has a chance to cause severe brain infections and possibly kill me. The published odds I get on that happening to me are changing all the time. My neurologist asks at every visit if I am concerned by the odds and want to switch medications. My most recent numbers were one in seven hundred, and I told him again I will be concerned when my odds worsen to below one in two hundred. Above that, my mind treats the risk like the odds of being struck by lightening or dying in a car crash on the way to work. These things happen all the time, but the odds are not worth worrying about because my mind puts them all in the remote risk category. My minds inability to internalize the risk helps me live my day to day life. I justify my thinking about taking Tysabri by noting my odds are still better than a Cancer patient taking Chemo which has a mortality rate of one in two hundred. I do not think about the large number that is my odds of getting the brain infection. Rather I think about it in comparison to something else.

The comparison method is the only way I think most of us truly attach meaning to large numbers. This is what I am doing when I compare the mortality rate taking Tysbari with the mortality rate of a cancer taking chemo. When we release data on the United States economy, most people care more about the direction of the change in numbers and how fast they are changing rather than how big the actual base number was. Most of us really cannot intuit the GDP reports talking about trillions of dollars.

When it comes to large numbers, we just need to be careful to be mindful of what the large numbers are for which we see differences and the differences in scale between different large numbers. If we can manage these two obstacles, we might avoid some of the common mistakes in our perceptions of the universe in which we live. Maybe then we can stop comparing “many” to “whole lots.”

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