This is my blog so I’m going to vent here. Yes, we do provide respite care … but we ONLY provide such care for families we are working with extensively to help the parents transform their parenting approach so that their child feels safe and can make secure attachment. In the interim, we work intensively with the child to help them learn respect for authority, how to regulate their emotions better, and accept the same parenting tools and techniques that his or her parents are learning and will employ in their own home. Earlier this month, I received sixteen calls in one week seeking respite care. Most of these families just want someone to take their “sick” child in and heal him. They don’t want to look in the mirror and see what part of the equation THEY have in helping their child heal. There are plenty of other respite facilities that will take in any child whose parents are paying their fee. We are not interested in that at all. This is a ministry and our focus is on helping the family to heal from the inside-out and that necessarily involves the parents working hard, too.
That being said, we put our money where our mouth is in hiring experts to conduct training seminars for the families in our surrounding communities. We have one of the nation’s best respite provider — recommended by Nancy Thomas herself — scheduled to do a respite training on 09/15/2012. I invited each of those 16 moms to the seminar, imploring them to bring a friend/neighbor/family member to be trained so that they can build up their own team. Every one of them had an excuse. We are just two people — and there are very few truly-qualified, worthwhile professional respite provides. Most of those charge a lot of money for their services; and few families can afford them. We want to equip families to HELP THEMSELVES … but we cannot do it when so many families refuse to do so.
Any mom of a RAD child should be able to see the value of having someone close to them trained in respite care as a critical part of their team, ready and willing to step in to help during times of crises or when the mom just needs a break. It is deplorable that so many families are sitting back and waiting for others to step up and do all the work. We have been doing respite or therapeutic foster care for catastrophically-effected children for more than a decade and *I* cannot wait to learn what wisdom Susan has to teach at the 09/15/2012 seminar! She is a speaker, author, respite provider, counselor-candidate, and adoptive mom of a now-healed and thriving RAD child.
We can only help families who accept the offer and DO THEIR PART. That includes building their own support team … and having a trained respite provider is one of the most critical members of that team. We invite each of you to come and bring someone to be trained. Learn more about respite care, what it is, what it is not, and how it should be done!
While I understand your frustration, your name does infer what people would consider respite care to be. Many of us commitments that don’t necessarily allow us the luxury of leaving our areas or spending so much money. Some of us had commitments to others before realizing we had a RAD child. W/O going into detail, my husband and I are well educated professionals with 4 other children that also deserve a piece of us. We will find a way to attend a training or camp, we are not sitting back waiting for anyone to do our job. We simply need a break until that can happen. As a really old former ER nurse, I understand your frustration, but we all have different circumstances.
Thank you for your comments, Marcia. There are different types of respite, however. We do not offer simple respite care here: when a parent just needs a few hours to get their hair done or have lunch with a friend (but we do train others to offer that critical service in their home communities). We will provide motivational respite: when a child needs to remember how awesome their adopted family really is and begin to reach out to them rather than flatly-rejecting them. But primarily we provide what I term catastrophic respite: when the family is at the end of the rope, so to speak, and pondering whether to dissolve the adoption by surrendering the child to foster care or long-term residential/psychiatric care.
The day the original post you responded to was written, I had been bombarded with a number of moms who had attended a multi-day “mom’s retreat” in Florida a few months earlier, only to return home to worse-chaos than they left (because the adage is true: the inside always matches the outside, and their children did not feel safe!). A few of those moms tried to bully me into taking their child; a tactic I had never heard experienced in this ministry. They badgered me with comments such as “you *have* to…” and “it will be your fault…” No, I don’t HAVE to do anything unless God commands it, and it most certainly would NOT be my fault if their family implodes!
One point I do want to make here is that bad respite is worse than no respite, just as bad therapy is certainly worse than no therapy. It is never in a family’s best interests to find someone, anyone, to care for their RAD child, no matter how limited the time period, if that person does not understand RAD and is not willing to honor the parents above all. When mom says bedtime is 7:30 pm, or no snacks after dinner, or only one 30-minute cartoon, she needs someone who will honor her and abide by those. Otherwise, the child perceives the respite provider as on their (the child’s) side, aligned with him against the mom — especially if the respite provider and the child align to keep secrets (don’t tell your mom I let you stay up until 10:00 pm). If you contact me privately and let me know what state you’re in, I may be able to refer you to a professional respite provider in your area.
Praying for you today!
“Spending so much money? Our ministry is just that: a *ministry*. We charge a mere fraction (and a small one at that!) of what other “respite providers” charge families and we dedicate 100% of our time and energy to helping ONE child/family at a time heal from the inside-out, through God’s grace and love. We do require families to be vested in the process, which necessarily requires *some* financial outlay … as well as working critically to understand their own triggers and how their responses and reactions affect their child’s behavior.
Back to my original post: I still stand behind the fact that moms leaving their distressed child behind to go spend four days out of state is counter-productive and too-often results in more-drama than the family had to endure before the mom’s trip.