Behavior Communicates Need
Early on in my foster parent licensing process, I got directed to the Empowered to Connect website that contains a very comprehensive collection of resources to help understand effective ways to parent "children from hard places." This website is devoted to the principles developed by researchers Karyn Purvis and David cross, now known as Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), in understanding the needs of children that have experienced trauma.
I'll give a very, very brief overview of some of the research that supports this parenting philosophy, but please know that I will do a clumsy job compared to the experts and that it is well worth it to spend some time going through the website.
TBRI is based on the idea that any behavior displayed by a child is the communication of the need. Children that have significant trauma backgrounds, even if the trauma occurred during the mother's pregnancy and even if the child was placed with a non-birth parent at birth, have experienced a disruption in the ability of the person biologically expected to care for them from being able to meet their legitimate needs. Obviously, the severity of the unmet needs can vary based on particular circumstances, but if you don't have a parent that meets your basic survival needs as an infant, or your developmental needs in early childhood, you start developing other coping strategies to get your needs met or distract yourself from having needs.
One of the primary goals of the TBRI strategy is to meet your child where their needs were initially disrupted in order to help them re-learn helpful, positive coping strategies to get the resources they need, and then they can work through that developmental stage to the next one. But in order to be able to start making developmental progress, they need to unlearn what had previously worked for them.
Enter TBRI. Implementing TBRI means that you give up focusing on correcting short-term behavior efficiently and instead focus on the long goal - how do I help my child work through the various developmental phases that they missed to get to a point where they can reasonably communicate their needs. This all sounds well and good, but it is EXHAUSTING, and can be a really frustrating process. The goal of TBRI is to try to figure out what need is being communicated and then instead of addressing the behavior, work with the child to meet the need. Common examples are if a child is lying, focus not on punishing them for lying, but remember that lying was probably something they learned to do as a self-preservation mechanism and make it safe for them to admit to lying and reward them for telling the truth. Sounds simple, right?
But not every behavior has an obvious motivation. We have gone through cycles with our six-year-old foster daughter where she would have age-inappropriate temper tantrums daily. Those stopped for a period of several months largely in thanks to the work her counselor was doing with her and through managing her environment, and they are now resurfacing again. This is not a behavior that we have particularly missed.
Sometimes it's pretty obvious what is triggering the meltdown - a friend was supposed to come over and plans changed at the last minute. Dealing with unmet expectations is hard, and she doesn't have a lot of coping skills to work through the disappointment easily. But sometimes we're clueless. Her counselor, who she loves, was coming to see her one morning and we told her she needed to get dressed before the counselor arrived. That led to a full meltdown about not wanting to put pants on. Why was putting pants on so awful to her in that moment? We have no clue. She doesn't know. The counselor didn't get to the bottom of it. But two things were clear: it wasn't really about the pants, and forcing her to put pants on wouldn't have helped the situation.
There was a pretty clear boundary here. She had to be dressed if there were going to be guests at the house, even if the guest was a counselor. So now we had to figure out how to get her cooperation while also hopefully regulating the emotional response that was out of proportion for the situation.
My husband told her she needed to get dressed. She said she wasn't going to. So this is what we, being non-TBRI experts, did:
The situation I just described actually did happen, and it's one that I feel like we handled fairly well. But there are many, many more examples where we didn't handle them as well as I would have liked. I don't yell often, but I've reached my limit where I've yelled at our foster daughter to get her to cooperate because we were late for school and I had just completely lost my patience. Or because she was being uncooperative and kicked me in the middle of one of her fits. Or threw a shoe across the room. I have triggers, too, and she sometimes hits those.
But nobody's going to do this perfectly. And there is room for lots of grace. I consistently remind myself that the messages of frustration that I send in those moments are not the regular messages we communicate to her. And she knows that even when I get frustrated that I will come back to repair things with her. I reassure her that I don't stop loving her even when I get angry, and that in the frustrating moments, my primary concern is about her and not my own well-being. That I want us to work as a team and to have good mornings and be able to do fun things. Sometimes life is hard, though, and things don't work out perfectly. But there will always be tomorrow morning where we have the chance to start off on the right foot again.
I'll give a very, very brief overview of some of the research that supports this parenting philosophy, but please know that I will do a clumsy job compared to the experts and that it is well worth it to spend some time going through the website.
TBRI is based on the idea that any behavior displayed by a child is the communication of the need. Children that have significant trauma backgrounds, even if the trauma occurred during the mother's pregnancy and even if the child was placed with a non-birth parent at birth, have experienced a disruption in the ability of the person biologically expected to care for them from being able to meet their legitimate needs. Obviously, the severity of the unmet needs can vary based on particular circumstances, but if you don't have a parent that meets your basic survival needs as an infant, or your developmental needs in early childhood, you start developing other coping strategies to get your needs met or distract yourself from having needs.
One of the primary goals of the TBRI strategy is to meet your child where their needs were initially disrupted in order to help them re-learn helpful, positive coping strategies to get the resources they need, and then they can work through that developmental stage to the next one. But in order to be able to start making developmental progress, they need to unlearn what had previously worked for them.
Enter TBRI. Implementing TBRI means that you give up focusing on correcting short-term behavior efficiently and instead focus on the long goal - how do I help my child work through the various developmental phases that they missed to get to a point where they can reasonably communicate their needs. This all sounds well and good, but it is EXHAUSTING, and can be a really frustrating process. The goal of TBRI is to try to figure out what need is being communicated and then instead of addressing the behavior, work with the child to meet the need. Common examples are if a child is lying, focus not on punishing them for lying, but remember that lying was probably something they learned to do as a self-preservation mechanism and make it safe for them to admit to lying and reward them for telling the truth. Sounds simple, right?
But not every behavior has an obvious motivation. We have gone through cycles with our six-year-old foster daughter where she would have age-inappropriate temper tantrums daily. Those stopped for a period of several months largely in thanks to the work her counselor was doing with her and through managing her environment, and they are now resurfacing again. This is not a behavior that we have particularly missed.
Sometimes it's pretty obvious what is triggering the meltdown - a friend was supposed to come over and plans changed at the last minute. Dealing with unmet expectations is hard, and she doesn't have a lot of coping skills to work through the disappointment easily. But sometimes we're clueless. Her counselor, who she loves, was coming to see her one morning and we told her she needed to get dressed before the counselor arrived. That led to a full meltdown about not wanting to put pants on. Why was putting pants on so awful to her in that moment? We have no clue. She doesn't know. The counselor didn't get to the bottom of it. But two things were clear: it wasn't really about the pants, and forcing her to put pants on wouldn't have helped the situation.
There was a pretty clear boundary here. She had to be dressed if there were going to be guests at the house, even if the guest was a counselor. So now we had to figure out how to get her cooperation while also hopefully regulating the emotional response that was out of proportion for the situation.
My husband told her she needed to get dressed. She said she wasn't going to. So this is what we, being non-TBRI experts, did:
- Tried to make it into a game. "Let's pick out the craziest outfit we can to wear." Didn't work.
- Broke it down into just a single next step at a time. "Okay, let's just start by taking off your pull-up and putting on clean underwear." Didn't really work. Got the pull-up off, but had to coerce her a little get the underwear on.
- Gave her a choice. "You have to be dressed if you want to leave your room. But if you don't want to get dressed, you can stay in your room." I just said this in a very matter-of-fact way - not emotional or shaming or judgmental. It was a non-emotional communication of options. However, it still didn't work, and at this time the screaming and kicking and throwing things started. So she was pretty clearly emotionally disregulated at this point, and we had to stop focusing on the action we wanted from her and first focus on re-regulating her.
- So I put my hand on her back and rubbed her back and told her it seemed like she was having a rough morning and was pretty frustrated. She yelled at me to leave her alone. So I left her room for a few minutes.
- After more screaming and yelling, I went back in to see if she would accept any comfort. She again just told me to leave her alone, so I did.
- I went in again a few minutes later and asked if I could help her try to calm down, she walked to the corner of her room and sat down facing the wall and told me she'd rather be in time out. So I left again.
- Eventually she called me into her room. I asked her what we could do to help her calm down. She just shrugged. So I asked her if she would like to take a bath, and then she said she was hungry. So she got the water started for a bath and we got some go-gurts out, and she ate those while soaking in the tub.
The situation I just described actually did happen, and it's one that I feel like we handled fairly well. But there are many, many more examples where we didn't handle them as well as I would have liked. I don't yell often, but I've reached my limit where I've yelled at our foster daughter to get her to cooperate because we were late for school and I had just completely lost my patience. Or because she was being uncooperative and kicked me in the middle of one of her fits. Or threw a shoe across the room. I have triggers, too, and she sometimes hits those.
But nobody's going to do this perfectly. And there is room for lots of grace. I consistently remind myself that the messages of frustration that I send in those moments are not the regular messages we communicate to her. And she knows that even when I get frustrated that I will come back to repair things with her. I reassure her that I don't stop loving her even when I get angry, and that in the frustrating moments, my primary concern is about her and not my own well-being. That I want us to work as a team and to have good mornings and be able to do fun things. Sometimes life is hard, though, and things don't work out perfectly. But there will always be tomorrow morning where we have the chance to start off on the right foot again.
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