Transitions

This is the theme for this week's Weekly Adoption Shout Out but, a bit like when I posted about Play, it's hard to isolate a transition in Baby Spouse's life.
Other friends - parents of adopted and birth children - talk about transitions meaning changes of school and carer, I'm guessing moving house, that sort of thing. Obviously moving to a foster carer or an adoptive family would be under this heading too.

But I see Baby Spouse transitioning multiple times a day. This afternoon he woke up from his nap and yelled something approximating to "I'M AWAKE AND THIS IS WRONG". Every day when we go to nursery he has to adjust. He had three weeks off over Easter (it would normally be two but he was in hospital before that) and he was pretty upset when he went back. I was very pleased to hear he'd been clinging to his carer for most of the day - it means he knows she's safe. He's also only just started to get excited when I get his coat out, because he's worked out it means he's going somewhere, potentially exciting (rather than being grumpy becaOther friends - parents of adopted and birth children - talk about transitions meaning changes of school and carer, I'm guessing moving house, that sort of thing. 
Sadly, although we know his nursery is great, we are looking for somewhere else. The combination of location (near my work, not near home or the station that Mr Spouse commutes from), and hours (very short) and flexibility (never able to switch days) means I've been having to turn down important work travel - even just short overnight trips or long days - as only I can practically drop him off in the mornings.
Baby Spouse would have to change keyworkers at the end of the year anyway, but the nursery is lovely otherwise, so I am a bit sad to be thinking of taking him out. However I have had a clever idea, to see if he'd cope with some days at nursery and some with a childminder. I think we'd prefer to use a childminder for after school care if we need it in the future, anyway. So I'm crossing my fingers and going to do some ringing round later today or tomorrow. I didn't think they'd appreciate a daytime call today on the last day of the school holidays.
But in my "are they completely mad" mode commenting on adoption practice, I gather from other adopters of fairly young babies that the standard approach is to have a fairly short period of introductions (where adopters meet children first in their foster carers' home and then transitioning to their own home). I also know that adopters have fought - usually unsuccessfully - to have informal meetings before introductions, even where they are already parents of a biological sibling of a new child. Answer this question with your sensible hat on: who is a newly adopted baby going to feel safe with? Someone they've known for a couple of months and have seen at least weekly, and who has been caring for them daily for weeks? Or someone they met last week and who more or less immediately leapt into the parent role?

Last day

When I went back to work I started at 2 days a week and had some Wednesdays off to make up for some work days while I was on adoption leave. I had a few more before Easter and thought that was it, but then the last one ended up with Baby Spouse in hospital which happily comes under a different heading to actual holiday.
So I have a final day off tomorrow. It feels odd - like I'm really, properly going back to work, even though I'm still part time, and I started back in November. No more mummy and baby skiving off.

File under "mildly sceptical" - part 1

This isn't normally the kind of post I put here, it's not massively relevant to our family, and actually, I should be working, but for some reason I'm feeling a little fidgety and also mildly irritated by some things. I am debating whether to move this to my other blog (where I don't talk much about our family, but what the hey, everyone I know in real life knows we are adopters, so it's not a big secret).

So.

I've been having some Twitter conversations with psychologists who don't have anything to do with adoption, but who are getting increasingly irritated with scientists and clinicians publishing papers saying "this therapy is brilliant!" when it isn't. And I also follow a lot of quack-watch type people (Ben Goldacre etc.), and frankly, the state of "therapeutic" offerings for children who have had dreadful early life experiences is way, way below the standard offered by the slightly self-promoting scientists and clinicians. It seems in some cases to be nearer the homeopathy, cranial osteopathy, and pseudo-qualified nutritionists of this world that are the subject of quack watch types.


Let me say at this point that I know I am going to get comments by people saying "but but but we've tried A B or C and it was FABULOUS and our lives have been TURNED AROUND and this person is a God!".

Fine. You can believe that. But if something, on average, has no effect - then that means half the group gets better, half gets worse.  What if you ended up in the group that got worse? Would you be happy you spent your money on it?

And if on average children on a treatment get better (but only compared to themselves at the beginning, or only compared to children who weren't getting any treatment) then it could easily be because they are growing older (children learn things and become better behaved, mainly, as they get older) or because they've had some special attention.  This is usually cheaper than therapy.


So... I thought I'd see what evidence there was for a couple of the really popular training and therapy centres that are talked about a lot by adoptive parents: the Child Mental Health Centre (Margot Sunderland's place) and Family Futures (which is a voluntary adoption agency,and I believe in that capacity has great inspection reports, I'm not sure that its training side gets inspected).

The Child Mental Health Centre says one of its aims is:

Dissemination of Research

To promote positive social change through disseminating the latest research in child, parent and family mental health

To make available to parents, teachers, child-care professionals, providers and custodians of services, politicians and the lay-public at large, a comprehensive up-to-date knowledge base in child and family well-being

To fund an effective dissemination of psychologically and neurobiologically based research. Organisational isolation can be costly: ...wasting time slowly re-discovering what is already known (Baron Peter Slade, 2000)

Family Futures says:

Our therapeutic interventions draw upon and are informed by the work of Dan Hughes, Theraplay, Bruce Perry, Bessel Van der kolk, Babette Rothchild and Dr A. Jean Ayres and many others.

I'm still looking for a list of research that the Child Mental Health Centre is disseminating, So I'll start with Family Futures. Let's take those in turn and see what evidence there is that these theories and therapies work.

Dan Hughes: I found this paper by him about his therapy and its basis. It doesn't present any evidence for its evaluation, and I am not completely sure (because it's not my area of specialisation) that his therapy described there is the same as Dynamic Developmental Psychotherapy, but DDP is compared in a few studies to treatment-as-usual, and it seems to come out well. The studies aren't large, but then fully diagnosed Reactive Attachment Disorder isn't common.  The studies don't tell us anything about DDP in children who haven't got RAD. This review suggests that the statistics in this study are pretty rubbish, and worries about some of the ethics of it.

Family Futures now offer a training course that includes DDP, which they call "Neuro-Physiological Psychotherapy". I'm not sure what makes it neurophysiological, as neurophysiologists are generally medical doctors who have a speciality in a branch of neurology, or lab scientists who work with lab animals. I'm also not quite sure whether the hyphen makes a difference.
The "Recommend to a Friend test": I might recommend this to a friend whose child had a diagnosis of RAD. But probably not. I'm not sure if enough is known about it to know if it would be harmful or helpful, or neither, to a child who didn't have such a diagnosis.

Theraplay: Chapter 5 in this book talks about the evaluation of Theraplay. The studies randomised children to either treatment or waiting list controls (which aren't necessarily the best control - partly because just giving children attention rather than no treatment can improve outcomes). A lot of the children in this study had some developmental disability, which is typical of children who also have the kind of behaviour problems Theraplay is often recommended for. The chapter says that the children who had therapy improved more than the children who were on the waiting list, though I can't seem to find (perhaps I'm not looking hard enough) any graphs or figures that directly compare these two groups, only graphs showing children's behavioural problems before and after Theraplay. A review I found here says there aren't any other studies showing Theraplay is effective, and makes a good point about its theoretical basis in attachment theory but the fact that it kind of ignores attachment theory in how it is supposed to work.
The RtaF test: I'm not convinced I would.  The Wettig book chapter is rather grandiose in how many different disorders it claims Theraplay can treat or influence, too, which puts me off considerably.

Bruce Perry: I can find a lot of articles by Bruce Perry on the theory behind what happens to children if they are neglected or abused.  Certainly (if they are validated) it can be helpful to understand what's going on when you have a child that's difficult to parent. He does talk a little about therapy, but doesn't recommend or describe any particular type, saying instead 

the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) allows identification of the key systems and areas in the brain which have been impacted by adverse developmental experiences and helps target the selection and sequence of therapeutic, enrichment, and educational activities.

It's beyond the scope of this post (read: I should be doing something else) to evaluate ALL of his ideas about what affects what when development is disrupted. He does have a tendency to say "brain" when he means "behaviour" or "cognitive development". For example he talks about "

NMT Functional Status and Brain ‘‘Mapping’ [...] An interdisciplinary staffing is typically the method for this functional review. This process helps in the development of a working functional brain map for the individual [see Figure 2, which is a rather odd pyramid showing the names of brain areas shaded in dark or light]. This visual representation gives a quick impression of developmental status in various domains of functioning: A 10-year-old child, for example, may have the speech and language capability of an 8-year-old, the social skills of a 5-year-old, and the self-regulation skills of a 2-year old. 

(In other words, they will do some behavioural and cognitive testing, make assumptions about which brain area is responsible in children, and tell parents they are making a brain map. My quack detectors are twitching. We know very little about how normal brain-behaviour links are mapped,and even less about how they develop in children who have difficulties. Many very clever and famous people have said this, lots of times). He is careful not to recommend any specific types of therapy but he also says:

the sequence in which these are addressed is important. The more the therapeutic process can replicate the normal sequential process of development, the more effective the are (see Perry, 2006). Simply stated, the idea is to start with the lowest (in the brain) undeveloped=abnormally functioning set of problems and move sequentially up the brain as improvements are seen.

Erm... well, I'm a developmental neuropsychologist, and I've never, ever heard of this principle. As he's quoting himself, do you think possibly he might be the only person who thinks this? 
OK, it's possible that he's right, and everyone else is wrong - 64 other articles have cited this article. The fact that I can't find any neuropsychologists who have cited it might tell you something.
The RtaF test: Go and do a university developmental psychology course, preferably also a university neuropsychology course, if you want to know how the brain develops.  The Open University is very good. 

If you have a child who's suffered trauma, there is an evaluated treatment for this - which is again mentioned by the Allen review article - Trauma-Directed CBT. I can't see either of the centres I'm looking at recommending this or training people on it.

Right - I'm supposed to be doing something else (oops). I will be back another time...