Adoption Lesson Learned: Everything’s My Fault

One of the things that we’ve been working on is “doing things the right way the first time.”  This means that instead of doing a partial job or a poor job and saying, “I’ll do it right later”, that we do the job right to start out.

This can be very frustrating for someone who has never been asked to do things well.  Or, really, the problem can be that a person has never been told that they can do something well.

There is a big difference between being taught to do something well and being yelled at because one never learned how to do a job.

One of the things I have learned in this process is that somewhere in the past, a large number (dare I guess most?) of the children in foster care have been yelled at because something broke or wasn’t perfect.  But the yeller (parental figure of some sort) never actually took the time to teach an alternative approach.

This leaves a child to try and figure out how to survive:  emotionally, physically, etc.

I have observed a child get frustrated because a shirt was not on the hanger correctly and needed to be redone.  While trying to take the shirt off the hanger, he had no idea that it was buttoned up too high to be able to just pull it, or, indeed, that there might be another method to removing the shirt from the hanger.  He pulled too hard.  The hanger broke.  This freaked him out so much that he was instantly on the floor crying, “Everything’s my fault!” 

It turns out, that somewhere in his past, everything really did get blamed on him.  He was so afraid that the responsible adult would begin yelling at him, that he pre-empted the possibility.  The adult sat down on the floor by him and reassured him that he was not going to be yelled at, that sometimes things get broken.  “Sometimes, something has to break before we learn to take care of it well.  You want to know a secret?  I break things all the time.”  It took a while but he finally calmed down and just looked surprised that no one was yelling.  The adult asked him to throw away the broken hanger and get a different one; and then sat beside him and instructed a new way to hang and care for the clothes.  “Ohhh, I didn’t know you could do that.”

Some days I get so frustrated that it’s hard not to respond to my child in frustration.  But God is teaching me:  “How shall they learn with out a teacher?”