Marian: age 20, adopted from Romania @ age 6

    I was born in Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania and placed immediately into an orphanage. For seven years I lived in the most infamous orphanage in Romania, “The Institute for The Unsalvageable.” What was the orphanage like? Well, it of course is my only reference for the bottom pit of human suffering, but that’s what it was. It was living hell. The details are difficult for me to talk about but I think it’s important that people know. The building was a barren concrete building, I think three stories tall. Only a handful of the children were clothed, there was three inches apart from us and we would squat basically all the time. It was so crowded that we had no access to any bathrooms. We would squat in our own urine and...you know. The orphanage was for “irrecoverable” children. When I was born I had to have heart surgery. I was a burden of the state. Since I had been in hospice after birth I had been considered a disabled child, which is why I was considered qualifies to placed in Sighetu Marmatiei. As an infant I was of course placed in the cribs. It was the typical deal, 30 so children to one nurse, feedings, changings, and that's it. Rarely picked up, talked to, etc. This was the nice part of Sighetu Marmatiei. While I have no memory of being an infant of course, the cribs etc. I do know that whatever I felt at the time, whatever deprivation or pain I had, the nightmare had only begun. After the age of four I was considered to be ‘phased out’ of the cribs, and placed with the regular kids. I think that someone had actually tried to adopt me, or save me whatever, but they made it SO difficult that it never happened. I found later that they had a minimum care requirement and because of that discouraged adoptions, especially since we were “irrecoverable”. When I was about five I was placed in the other room...the room without cribs...and that was when the real hell. As I said, we were so croweded we were squatting constantly. We would just go to the bathroom on the floor, basically slep side by side, holding eachother up. We were ferrel, it is a miracle I am able to communicate, speak, act the way I do. Twice a day the nurses would take us out and feed us a white oatmeal like paste, I would eat it with my hands. If you misbehaved the nurses would tie your wrist to a pipe, so many of these kids had injuries but just stewed in their own suffering. Some really were disabled, ‘irrecoverable’ by soviet standards. That was not me.

    I had a lot of issues from my time in Sighetu Marmatiei. When people, specifically children, aren’t interacted with they can get a tic where they rock back forth. It has been explained to me, it’s because its the mind, or bodies, or both, it's their way of making up for lack of stimulation and interaction. When I was adopted, I had been conditioned to spend all of my days sitting, in fact huddling around twenty hours a day. I have issues from the orphanage, my speech is delayed and I had issues socializing….talking to people. I was often hostile, dramatic, or completely in my own world, i would block everything in front of me out. I was malnourished when I was adopted, I had rarely been touched, I would just stay awake all night, just staring. My (adopted) mother says that when she saw me, and for when went home, that I would never cry. I had learned that nobody was interested in what I needed, so I gave up. I was adopted when I was six. I would rock in my bed at night, I could barely speak, put sentences together. i didn’t learn to read till I was about...I would say ten?

When i first really came into a ‘mainstream’ school, I was around 8. i had been adopted two year earlier, my language skills were pretty delayed. I had been given what the doctor called a “pre” diagnosis for attachment disorder a year before. I was not old enough to be formally diagnosed, but my behavior ‘demonstrated’ this disorder. I had a difficult experience school, I was hostile to the other kids, wouldn’t cooperate with my teacher. i thought that everybody was my enemy. At one point I thought my parents were my own enemy. I was so confused,  so bewildered by my time at Sighetu Marmatei that I was in...now that I look back, in a complete survival state. I would scream, never really saying anything. But I would just have these tantrums where I would scream. This became worse when I was older, believe-it-or-not. I was just so angry that screaming was all I could do.

Insight:

The longer you've been in an orphanage the more severe your behavior will be you. You will have lived through many developmental phases and you won’t have received sufficient care. Adults care, touch, and these are the recipe for a healthy child, and kids will not get that.

Punishments Which Have Worked:

    There is one punishment which has been consistently effective for the patients of the professionals I interviewed is also considered rather controversial. That is to pair the child with a teacher or a student to spend EXTRA time as punishment for the student with attachment disorder. It can be potentially problematic in a variety of ways, but in certain instances it can work.

    Regarding teacher-student relationship, the same principles can prove to be helpful.  No judgement, patience, persistence, and acceptance. When a child is forced to coexist attachment can become an advantageous action. These things that take time, so persistence is important. It is extremely important, if not unprofessional to not consult with a professional if you're dealing with a child of a certain level of problem behavior.

Post 2

    I grew up in San Francisco in the foster care system, I was placed there when I was nine. That felt really really old to be in foster care. Why I placed in to foster care? Well I would rather not share the details...but basically my home wasn’t very safe and was generally unreliable for even being an option to come home to at night...I’d rather not say more. I spent a lot of time on the streets and well...at that time we would go down to Polk street. I remember  San Francisco, in generally, was CRAZY. oh man, i used to just hangout on polk street from 7 to 4 in the morning. San Franciscowas crazy . i mean drag queens, prostitution was on every street in the tenderloin, am exageratting of course, but when you went on the street, you had to be careful. The tendleroin was a hectic place for people who wanted, or even needed to escape. I don’t think I left for almost two years. i really don’t. i don’t think that i walked All of this time was when I was in the foster care system, I would say starting from the age of 14 or 15 i would go hang outside of the balls at night. I panhandled, we had a community. Everyone from 13 to 19. I went to middle school at tenderloin elementary school, it was 1998 so i was the first class in fact. and, you know, the tenderloin is an overlooked neighborhood in san francisco. When your young, when you’re latino, when you don’t have anyone home three to ten at night, your very vulnerable. i might i had a LOT of issues with neighbors, etc. and at school, at school i really struggled. i was born into the foster care, meaning i had never until my eighteenth birthday not been in state care. i was lucky enough to grow up with only two families in my whole experience. the first family was in daly city and, to be honest, my memory of them is not that great. I lived with them from the ages of three to six. i remember it was one mother and there was just one other kid, a girl who was five years old (born by the mother). they were nice, it was a fine situation but i just really don’t remember much. but she was only qualified to be a short-term foster parent, god in a way i wish i stayed with her, but anyway at the age of four I was placed with Margo, a (foster) mother of five kids. We lived in 650 jones street, and to be honest it was a not a terrible part of the tenderloin. where i worked, hungout was, but i had an easy walk home.

    School for me was an impossibility. I mean after i started hanging out with all the kids at night, seeing the drag queens, the prostitutes. The money that was offered to you just walking down the street was impressive for someone like me. I would stand outside nob hill theater every single night and pulled dates with much older men. They would pay me to spend time with them, etc. After I started working at night out on the street and making considerable money, school was over. I mean I was making hundreds of dollars when i first started! But you know, all my childhood i had this drive to be normal so i did stay in school at first. I remember I would wander around polk street starting at like eleven oclock in the evening and i would walk until the sun rose, than I would walk straight to school! My foster mother enjoyed the benefits more than me. She was gone frequently, would dissapear inexpricably. I wasn’t abused, and I’m very lucky for that.  but starting around 11 I would just go out on the streets because...well because I was lonely. And I was desperate. You had to be desperate to go out there and hangout.

    The reason I left school was because of the way my situation was dealt with. The streets didn’t ‘suck me in’ like so many people say. No. My school just pushed me out. The thing that you need to understand about a foster kid is that….my whole life i felt like a problem. I mean literally. The way I viewed my entire place in the world was as a burden. You begin to feel that there is something deeply wrong with YOU, not the system.

    My behavior in school was obviously problematic.I mean I was provocative, everyone made fun of me and I would just respond to them by being more vulgar than they were. Oh man, I mean it was bizarre really. I was the biggest headache of the ENTIRE school

    -what was your biggest challenge in the classroom

    I felt really horrible and insecure, my bigges tproblem was not with any autorhity figures with the other kids. the biggest issue is I didn’t respect myself, so i was extremely hyperactive and self depricating. I mean i had such a minimal understanding of what a ‘normal’ childhood was that I didn’t even know where to start when trying to fit in! the only thing i knew for sure was that i was NOT normal. having the life i had, being exploited, i felt this deep shame about myself. in school, that was only reinforced. when i would act out, try to make a spectacle of myself, i wanted to escape everything that was associated with my REAL situation. so I couldn’t calm down in class. It wasn’t long until I dropped out, after my teacher said i was “hopeless” i left.

   

What Went Wrong

    No body throughout my whole school tried to connect with me or approached me with any holistic lens.  i was so obviously acting out from a deep seated pain and hate for….for myself really. every single day i would get into a fight, or i would cry, or i would do both. I was diagnosed with A.D.D., well sort of, by my teacher really, and I was dealt with according to that disorder.

    I was never medicated because I really never had a guardian who took me to be evaluated. Later on in life it never manifested...or that point didn’t really matter, but the way I was thought was as though I had an internal problem with paying attention and sitting still. That’s it. Boy were they wrong!

    They knew I was a foster kid, and I think they had some idea that my foster mom was either overloaded with other kids or just not really present. They invited her to meetings, even wanted to have her sit in class one day to see how I behave. Even at a younger age, i was almost amused by how WRONG they had her. My teacher would as “where is your mom? She hasn’t answered our calls for a week!” I of course couldn’t say the truth, which was; “I have no idea!” or “In bed...indefinetely.” So i would make up some type of story...typically that one of my other siblings had some type of emergency...or something ridiculous. Looking back, it was pretty obvious that nobody at home was concerned with me and I think that my teachers basically chose to ignore it.

Punishment:

    When I was punished in school the teachers would typically be really really angry. I was a pretty out there little kid, and the way they reacted, as I think of it now, was as though they took it really really personally. The teachers at this school, well it sounds kind of ridiculous, but the teachers judged me more than anything. There was always a condescending tone, a judgement involved. Like “you need to sit here till you are able handle yourself, till you able to be okay, than you can come back.” Always said with a sour, judgemental look on their face. This drove me CRAZY.  

    When they left me on time outs, this happened almost daily, I felt absolutely horrible. I felt like I was being mocked. As a foster kid, I was extremely paranoid, I can’t describe it but you really feel like everybody around you is basically looking for a reason to abandon you, make fun of you. Like i said, I had this deep seated feeling that I wasn’t right. I’ve carried that with me for so long, and obviously now, as an adult it’s not the same, but sometimes you still feel like a freak.

    When I went on time outs, I would FLIP OUT. I had no idea what to do with myself. I felt like I was being punished with the thing that traumatized me the worst.In a weird way I always knew that if I had a normal mother, father, or both, I would’ve been happier. It’s this deep seated anxiety that I’ve always had and no matter what I do I can’t get rid of it...well not that I can’t get rid of it. I can’t heal it. What punishments did work? None…(laughs). I just think that something would have changed if somebody had accommodated me. I would show up exhausted, dishevelled. Very rarely, but at times I would show up dirty if I had been out all night working. I would sleep with ten to fifteen different men a night. I was just becoming a teenager, I was in a complete survival state. I needed to be evaluated, talked to, counseled, and the only thing my teachers did was isolate me or speak with disgust.

        -What would you say to teachers about how to treat someone in your situation differently?

    I think that the teachers thought they could ‘treat’ me through the way a teacher would deal with a situation of this nature. I don’t think they felt compelled enough to refer me counseling or anything like that. I had SO much anger and, although it can seem impossible, I needed to connect with somebody and not just be thrown out the classroom. I guess my biggest advice is to approach my problems like you really care, and you’re not just looking for a solution. Punish with increased investment and interest, not putting a kid in solitude. And in some ways spending time with somebody can be MORE of punishment when you're in this survival situation, but it’s productive too, not like the time outs. The thing about this is that teachers need patience. A lot of times it’s hard because you’re just a teacher with X amount of resources, but you still need to try. And you still need to recommend other people for them to talk to. None of this happened.

Takeways:

-Relating

    The largest takeaway from this story is strategies and approaches for how to both discipline and relate to children in unstable or traumatic situations. While it may seem obvious, teachers may not always be aware of the judgement they display and it is crucial to keep an accepting and neutral tone and attitude. Another thing that is crucial is persistence, it is simply took a long time for me to connect with any sort of adult. Kids with severe instability in their lives, often associated with toxic environments, respond instability in the classroom as they do in their lives, shutting down or acting out. A teacher needs to have faith in themselves and be persistent. When a classroom is overloaded and this might not be possible, they need to advocate for the child in whatever way they can. With a school counselor, afterschool program, anything. No judgement, patience, persistence, and acceptance.

    jjjj-Discipline

    When disciplining, it is far better to send the child to a place where they will receive more attention, such as a principal, counselor, or idle teacher. If a child has attachment issues, this in fact more of a punishment than solitude, yet has positive outcomes. If a teacher is available, even if a child is having a complete meltdown, do not leave the child alone.

    Never blatantly insinuate the roots of behavioral issues, but it alright to guide the child. Yet it is not appropriate for a teacher to make any blatant statements of links to behavior issues, as they are simply unqualified and it could derail the constructive nature of a teacher-student relationship.

Post 1: Natalya Age 18 (Adopted From Russia)

Natalya, age 18. Adopted From Russia:

Background: Three months after my birth, my 16-year old mother committed suicide and I was placed in an orphanage near Yessentuki, Russia. The orphanage I was in was horrible. I was neglected and malnourished. In Yessentuki I never went outside, for three years I had never seen  the sun or been in fresh air. The nurses in the orphanage were either untrained or irresponsible, maybe even abusive. When I (and the other kids) would cry, they would give me Vodka to calm me down. They would smoke in front of me, never picked me up, just took care of the basic necessities. I was fed a broth that lacked whatever nutrients I apparently needed, that’s why I was so malnourished when I came America. The only thing that was good was no one was ever beaten like in many Russian orphanages. My mother drank and smoked when she was pregnant with me, I didn’t have fetal alcohol syndrome but I do have fetal alcohol damage from that. In the Yessentuki orphanage, I was fed vodka to calm to me down, and now I drink a lot in the United States. Now, my liver doesn’t work anymore. The doctors say it’s from extreme alcohol exposure and intake as a child, regardless of what it’s from I have to get surgery on my liver in November. I have also had one lung surgery from my own smoking and my mother smoking while pregnant. The one thing, in fact probably the worst thing, about being adopted is I have no medical records. I’ve had a lot of medical issues that obviously trace back to my childhood in Russia but there is really no information on my medical past. They have no idea who my mother was or what issues she had, other than what they can tell from my own health. I am predisposed to a lot but the doctors can only really work with what they see in my present state of health, which is a big concern. They say I may need lung surgery as well, I do smoke pretty heavily. At the age of three I was adopted by my parents and I came to San Francisco. The adjustment was really hard. I was sick for a whole year, I didn’t go to school or really do anything. I was so sick. The biggest thing that I struggled with was malnourishment, and that’s what caused a lot of my health issues when I first came to the United States. My body was in complete in shock.

After being adopted and coming the United States I had a lot of emotional issues as well. My identity was screwed up as a child, I didn’t know who my adopted parents were and I felt that I couldn’t trust them. Sometimes I’ll think about it, and I’ll get emotional about things when my adoption comes up. When I fight with my mom sometimes she’ll say she wishes she didn’t adopt me which really hurts.

Experience In School:

   

In lower school I was pretty blind to my experience, it didn’t really come up. I’ve been to four different high schools in the past three years. The first high school I went to was private and I think that while my life was less turbulent then that’s when I had the most emotional pain. I was cutting myself pretty bad and there were a lot of friends who were concerned, eventually the word went up to the administration and they talked to me. I felt like the issue was dealt with in a pretty insensitive way, and this was at a private high school. A classmate reported me for having severe depression and the administration did deal with it. I feel like it was dealt with in a pretty screwed up way. They wanted to place me. They didn’t look deeply into my whole experience at all, just at what they saw at the surface. And once again this is at a private high school.  

Insight:

Natalya’s experiences are not uncommon for children who experienced her level of deprivation and neglect. In child development there are two common categories: Experience Expectant and Experience Dependent developmen Natalya’s experience through the course of her life impacted her emotional, social, physical,  intellectual and psychological development. We know that timing of experience plays a significant role in brain development, particularly elements that occur after birth in regards to exposure to connections with people and sensory experiences. The ages in which Natalya was institutionalized are the most highly sensitive stages in an infant's development, known simply as the ‘sensitive period’. “Timing of experience of is critical to healthy development”, and this explains Natalya’s emotional and psychological developmental difficulties. This can be demonstrated by the Guiding Principles of Experience/Development:

1. Experience is the product of an ongoing, reciprocal interaction with the environment and the brain.
2. Individuality is the product of both personal experience and biological inheritance.

   

    Natalya’s ‘individuality’ can be tied to these psychological findings. Fetal alcohol exposure, malnutrition, and neglect as an infant has contributed to Natalya’s emotional and psychological issues. Natalya suffers from incredibly low-self esteem and has a poor sense of identity. “I’m sort of a ridiculous person and I definitely put up a show surrounding myself because I’m insecure.” In Romania’s Abandoned Children, it is established that “Emotional responses, and social behavior, as well as basic sensory and motor capacities are shaped powerfully and, in many cases, permanently, during these sensitive periods.” (Romania’s Abandoned Children 9). Subsequently, it can be assumed Natalya’s emotional responses in relationships with peers and authority figures, such as parents and teachers, have been altered by early adversity.

Addressing Complex Issues:

Given what has in regards to establishing and understanding the complex issues with institutionalized children in a school settings, how can these subtle and often times complex issues be better established and dealt with among elementary school teachers?

    Through academic research and interviews of professionals in a variety of field, from Social Work to Neuropsychology, I have learned what can go be good and bad when addressing the complex behaviors of children with such experiences. The longer you've been in an orphanage the more severe your behavior will be you. These children have lived through many developmental phases and you won’t have received sufficient care. Adults care, touch, and these are the recipe for a healthy child, and these kids don’t get this.   Dr. Carina Grandison, a developmental neuropsychologist says:

If you are a little baby and you are hungry, all babies get hungry, all babies cry when they get hungry, at least initially because they have learned that my crying will prompt somebody to come and feed me, so you learn that hunger cry, food, its good. so you start to have a little feeling that you're crying has power. Now, if you are in an orphanage, you are very likely not to be fed on your hunger signals, but you’re very likely to be fed because it’s the shift of the caretaker, and it's their clock. It’s time to be fed, your crying will have nothing to do with getting a bottle. So you will learn, in the first scenario, that your signals are messages to the world, and you will learn in the second scenario that your signals are irrelevant. so your brain expects different things in the two different scenarios, in the first scenario you learn, in bigger ways, that your signals can have an affect on the scenario, that your feelings are queues that people respond to, and your needs can be communicated and responded to. Vs. you get the message that your signals won't be heard, and very many times you’ll stop giving signals, so you lose a powerful place in the world, you don’t think you don’t matter. You get evidence all the time that it didn't matter when you voiced a need. this is a fundamental principle that will start to guide your life, did you have a say? or are you mute?

A child with this experience won’t learn that it’s feelings are ques that people respond, so you stop giving signals. You lose a powerful place in the world, you courage, self-esteem, self-worth. It can be detrimentally, emotionally.

Takeaways:

    The biggest strategies that need to be remembered when working with kids in similar situation/with similar experience are as follows:

• Patience
• You need to empower the student
• Empower through punishment-Have punishments which show the impact of the action, showing the child that they matter, have an impact and a voice.
• Never leave the child alone
• *For Teenage Students* If a child with low self-esteem is being reprimanded, do it privately. Often a child will be egged on or encourage with classmates witnessing.
• During times of crisis/tantrum (for younger student): never leave child alone.