Emotional intelligence

An adoptive child's emotional intelligence could have been 'helped' or hindered by their earlier lives and what they've been though since.

For my little one, she is highly tuned into her emotions and into naming those feelings. We have a couple of books about feelings that are easily accessible to her and she will occasionally specifically ask for one or pick it out.

The most recent example of this was after meeting up with her foster mother, foster brother and the new baby that they are now fostering. When meeting the baby, my Little One did very well on looking out for her for the day. On returning home however, within an hour she asked for the feelings book and dug through it to find a particular picture (below) "This me!" She said. "Mine!!!"

A bit of a chat followed to confirm and then talk through processing for how jealous she was feeling of the baby being with her foster family and of having to share them with the baby on our meet up.

At 3, she may be young, but she definitely knows how she feels!!

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little jumps

Little one is about to be 4... This means I'll be on some manic birthday planning after this. Figured I'm normally writing about the process, so today I'll share the latest for little one. She's also been going through a development jump. She's (successfully ) dressing herself without me and her writing is getting much clearer. She's exploring humour (ok, her jokes are mainly funny for the absurdity at this point). A month ago, if you asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, the answer was 'big'. Now, she's saying a doctor or an astronaut (depending on when in you ask). A lovely vtec laptop was gifted by friends a while ago and it seemed like time to let her explore it last week... Two days later, she was typing out her own name! Considering we were initially talking about what delays there may be for her language and speech, this is an extra achievement :) She had been still going to bed with a milk bottle until recently. This had moved to wat...

Direct Contact prep resources

I have mostly used online resources and remembered bits I've looked at previously, but will include other resources that I've been recommended in the below so that you can pull whatever is helpful for you! A lot of the first ones are aimed at social workers, but still have been really useful. Not least of all, because although this is something with a lot more push than it used to have, in my case, I've found they're no more resourced and haven't necessarily had a lot of focus (training) time for this. Online resources I've pulled from: Good practice guide - Contact-PG_E.pdf Staying Connected: the views of looked after children and young people on their contact arrangements - Coram Voice Supporting evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults | Research in Practice Contact: making good decisions for children in public law: Frontline Briefing (2024) | Research in Practice Staying in touch: Contact after adoption | Research...

Schools

I've just finished reading ' No Matter What ' by Sally Donovan. Sally's books have been recommended wherever the topic of adoption has come up, which says something in itself. This book is her story - what led her and her partner to look at adoption and the challenges that they experienced in the years that followed. One of the topics covered at a later part of the book is schooling. Interestingly, her experiences seem quite aligned with what Adoption Adventures described - sadly in both cases a child ended up having to move school because the initial school did not have an understanding of the effects of early trauma and that they might have to think about their strategies to help their behaviour. They also noted that it's not unusual for the behaviours to lead to a misdiagnosis of ADHD. Both mentioned that when the children had experienced that lack of safety then changes in the room that they couldn't see could leave them really unsettled. One thing advised ...

Sing in the rain

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