RAD discipline is critical to retraining our children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder, but it is also something that can go deadly wrong.

RAD Discipline: Incredibly Consistent Without Being Incredible

Some of my recent RAD articles have dealt with lying and stealing, two of the significant socially unacceptable behaviors associated with Reactive Attachment Disorder. Not surprisingly, I received a lot of comments regarding discipline. There were comments about how we just need to admit that these behaviors are wrong and stop trying to justify them. Other comments, presumably from persons who don’t have experience with Reactive Attachment Disorder, indicated that if punishments were serious enough that the behaviors would go away. Still other people suggested that there aren’t disorders, just a lack of discipline. However, RAD discipline must be handled with kid gloves.

RAD discipline is critical to retraining our children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder, but it is also something that can go deadly wrong.

I must first show some empathy for those who made the comments referred to, above. These sound much like comments that I, myself would have made before dealing with children who suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder, first-hand. So, to those who have loved ones who suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder, please show a little restraint when people don’t understand our particular situation. For many of us, it hasn’t been long since we came from many of those positions, ourselves. My purpose in these RAD blogs is to help people who are struggling in their own families by sharing experiences when my family saw success and when we failed. It is also an attempt to give reasonable explanations and requests for help from people in our families, communities, schools, churches, etc. who care enough to try to understand our plight as parents and caregivers of these precious though complex children. I’m not here to try to prove anything to anyone. RAD discipline is critical to retraining our children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder, but it is also something that can go deadly wrong.

Some deaths of children from Russia have been the result of RAD discipline carried too far.

Just over two years ago, President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Duma passed legislation making it illegal for people from the United States to adopt children from Russia. It was one of the saddest things that I have ever witnessed in my life. The justification that was used was that U.S. parents were abusing and murdering their adopted Russian children. Over the course of the time spanning just over two decades where Russian children were adopted by parents from the U.S., over 60,000 children from Russia were given new families in the United States. Nineteen or twenty of these Russian children have died in situations that Russia has termed as murders. While the Moscow Times has shown that adopted children in Russia are in much more danger than the ones adopted into families from the U.S., it doesn’t excuse abuse, neglect and deaths of Russian-born children in the U.S.

It is important that RAD discipline is used to re-train the brains of children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder to recognize cause and effect, rather than to bully them into understanding that misbehavior is never worth it.

Some deaths of children from Russia have been the result of RAD discipline carried too far. One of the reasons for this is the use of escalating punishments. With my biological children, when they broke rules, I punished them. If they continued to break the same rules, the punishments increased until it simply wasn’t worth it. That type of parenting, which is not unlike the punishments handed out by the U.S. judicial system, worked well with my first children. But escalating punishments never work with children who suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder. I would argue that such a strategy rarely works with any children who have been severely abused. These children have been pushed to incredible extremes and can go the distance, right up to the point of death, and beyond. Furthermore, they don’t view punishments as consequences to their actions, but simply as more abuse. When RAD discipline involves punishment that the child interprets as abuse, it damages the already fragile strands of attachment rather than strengthening them. It is important that RAD discipline is used to re-train the brains of children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder to recognize cause and effect, rather than to bully them into understanding that misbehavior is never worth it.

RAD discipline needs to serve the multiple purposes of teaching cause and effect while also discouraging unacceptable behaviors.

When the brains of children who suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder were in their most pliable states, many of them learned that there was no consistency to reaction to their actions. Good didn’t result in good. Bad didn’t result in bad. Stuff just happened. Often RAD kids completely miss cause and effect thinking. If we can correct this erroneous understanding of a strange world where nothing affects anything else, many of the other areas of difficulty that tend to come with Reactive Attachment Disorder can also improve. With children who don’t come from trauma, we pretty much use discipline to discourage the child from undesirable or dangerous behaviors. RAD discipline needs to serve the multiple purposes of teaching cause and effect while also discouraging unacceptable behaviors.

The use of the word “consequences,” along with loving rather than extreme RAD discipline, reinforces cause and effect thinking in our children.

We can teach our children who have Reactive Attachment Disorder that good brings on good and bad results in bad without going to extremes in punishments. A few sets of physical exercises are unpleasant but build a child rather than tearing them down. Consistently meeting unacceptable behaviors with unpleasant results, that would be difficult to interpret as abuse, teaches cause and effect thinking without damaging delicate attachment development. Maybe that’s why my children’s awesome therapist, Tamatha Smith, prefers the use of the word “consequences” to “discipline” or “punishments.” The use of the word “consequences,” along with incredibly consistent and loving, rather than extreme RAD discipline, reinforces cause and effect thinking in our children.

Because of the fragile states that accompany our children who come from trauma, we must be extremely careful when it comes to disciplining them. Oops. Sorry. “Providing consequences.” I often tell people in these blogs that I am not a professional, only a dad. No time is it ever more important for you to hear me say that than in a blog like this one, that talks about RAD discipline. RAD discipline involves additional goals and intentions as well as potentially serious negative consequences that are not present in disciplining other children. It’s a fine line to walk. Please don’t try to go it alone, without a professional therapist who specializes in your child’s particular disorder or you may do far more harm than good.

Often, readers receive as much help from other readers in the comments section as they do from the blog article, itself. Please be generous with your thoughts and experiences in the comments section. There are lots of people who need what you have to share. This is your chance to help them.

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