Loose Cannon: Reactive Attachment Disorder

In the nineties, every adopted kid and his brother had Reactive Attachment Disorder.  The stories about adopted kids who roamed their homes at night with kitchen knives, set fires in the kitchen and tortured the neighbor’s kittens came from the tearful moms who attended conferences about the post-institutionalized child.  I know.  I was there.

I remember going to one of these conferences in suburban Chicago with two of my adoptive mom friends.  We sat there, gaping really, because our kids weren’t smearing feces on the wall or stalking our pets.  Our kids had come from an institution (which is why we thought we were appropriate meeting attendees) – the Rolando Carazo Home for Children in Managua — though it seemed a little homier than the scary Romanian orphanages.  Our kids lived in the little cabins formerly occupied by President Somazo’s colony of prostitutes – a little tiny hooker village, if you will.

I believe that Reactive Attachment Disorder is a real thing.  See here for more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_disorder (Goodness, I love Wikipedia.) But like a lot of real conditions, it gets used a lot to explain stuff that if it occurred, in a non-adoptive family (also known as a regular family), people would just say that the kids seem to be a little out of control, wacky, not very nice, real jerks.

I think RAD is pretty rare.  I think it happens in kids who have no nurturing in infancy and who grow up never missing what they never had all while the people around them wonder why they don’t connect, care, and love them.  Adoptive parents, bless them, show up to parent a kid who has been left to bang his head on the broken slat of his crib for amusement, something he has been doing since he could sit up and skootch within striking distance, and then they wonder why the kid won’t look them in the eye and love them back when all he really wants is his old slat.

Something very weird in my make-up makes me understand this.  How a child without people will create his own comfort, make his own reality, guard himself from the fleeeting and unreliable.  I was never left or abandoned or abused, but I get this.

Adoptive parents – it takes more time that you want to think for a kid to trade the slat for a person.  In the meantime, you have to tolerate the head-banging.  On you.