Establishing Security for the Child

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog about Sylvia Duncan’s presentation at the Trauma Informed Practice Conference in Birmingham in September, which you can find HERE. I mentioned how she pointed out the importance of not making false promises, in order to gain a child’s trust. I have realised that there is something else she mentioned that is important to share.

She spoke about how children who have not been able to form attachments when they were very young, and those whose trust has been broken to the point where they have lost any willingness to form new attachments, may be 7 or 8 years old, but in a lot of ways, emotionally, they function like babies. Because they have not had the opportunity to go through those early development stages yet, or they have regressed to before the stage where they went through that development.

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Be Aware of Your Language

When Sylvia Duncan presented her story of a partnership that had an 83% success rate with helping children who were considered ‘impossible to place’, after a series of placement breakdowns, develop to a point where they were able to put into a longterm family placement, she brought up an important point. She mentioned that they made a point of not promising the children that they would be able to stay with a family longterm after the programme or that they would get a ‘forever family’ (as adoption families are often referred to). They only made them a promise that they knew was within their ability to keep: that there would be no more sudden placement changes without preparation.

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