What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?

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“Children from hard places” bring challenges that most adoptive and foster parents are ill-equipped to handle.

Understanding these challenges helps distressed caregivers and those contemplating adopting or foster care.

Key principles and skills help all parents, those working with at-risk children, and the children themselves.

This post is part of a series on adverse childhood experiences. Read the other parts here.

Adopted or foster children come with challenging experiences. All have been separated from their biological parents. Many had biological mothers who experienced prenatal distress, heavy drinking, or other difficulties. Others have experienced neglect or abuse, or have witnessed domestic violence. Though they might appear normal outwardly, many will show:

Attachment problems, such as refusing affection

Impaired neurological development (dysregulated stress hormones damage the brain)

Social, learning, and or attention difficulties

Heightened sensitivity to unfamiliar sensory stimuli, such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or being touched (neglected children deprived of normal sensory stimuli can be overwhelmed by new sensations, as can traumatized children who are fearful and distrustful)

Rage, tantrums, aggression, and hyperactivity (What might appear to be defiance is often the child’s inability to regulate a hypervigilant nervous system)

Shame, withdrawal, numbing, and other trauma symptoms

For these fragile children, caregivers must not only provide love, safety, and structure, but also patiently help them heal and satisfy their earliest unmet needs. Psychologist Karyn Purvis and colleagues have written a critically important resource, The........

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