My name is Jean Meriam. I am a mother of 6 and former foster mother of many.
As a foster parent I was flung into the world of FASD with virtually no education about this disorder and made many mistakes along the way. Through several years of rese
A few days ago I posted about confabulations and lies in FASD. A topic many of us are all to familiar with. Some of the stories our children come out with are funny, some leave us shaking our heads in bewilderment, some like those that lead to allegations of abuse or other wrong doing can shake us to the core.
Fetal Alcohol Child will be moving to the new domain over the next two weeks. I will place a link on this site each day to the new posts at Fetal Alcohol Child
www.fetalalcoholchild.com
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Invisible Children and Families of FASD is probably one of the best series of videos I have seen describing the family life of those coping with fetal alcohol exposure. It can be an eye opener to those who are new to the disorder and will explain many behaviours of the children to parents who are just not sure what is bad behaviour and what is caused by the alcohol exposure. I have watched it several times and shared it with friends and family.
I have decided to begin with Part 2 as Part 1 is the mothers finding out what was going on with their children. If you are reading this blog you probably already have a good idea. If not here is the link to Part 1.
I really recommend you share these videos with those who are close to you and your child so they can understand more of what you are going through together.The series is divided into six parts. You can watch Part 2 below. The remaining segments will be available at the end of the video.
Have you ever had a dream so vivid, so plausible, that you thought it might be real? I have woken from dreams where my children had broken a rule or a friend had betrayed me and for a few moments after waking still been upset and wondering how to deal with problem until I became fully aware that it was a dream. Had I not been aware that the events were only a dream and shared the betrayal or story with another I would be confabulating the story.
FASD children confabulate frequently. They occasionally frequent a world where the dreams and workings of their imagination can not be separated from reality. It is a common occurrence among people suffering from differing forms of brain damage and it is not a purposeful attempt to deceive. One of the best definitions I have read for confabulations comes from Wikipedia
“ In psychology, confabulation is the spontaneous narrative report of events that never happened.”
Confabulation in those with FASD is caused by damage to the prefrontal cortex.(Frontal lobes) This damage causes them to believe in false memories or perceptions. Sometimes the events did not happen at all and are based only in the imagination. Other times FASD confabulations are caused by actual events combined with stories the child might have heard from others being drawn together into a false memory or belief.
The oddest confabulation I have ever heard from my fetal alcohol effected daughter makes some sense in retrospect. The story itself makes no sense, but how she came to confabulate such a story does. When she was four years old she either jumped or fell off the back deck. She was not allowed on this deck but snuck out after the cat. My guess is she fell trying to catch the cat but we will never be sure. Her account of the accident is well, unusual.
“ The stars went dark. The ladder disappeared and the aliens pushed me.”
When I raced outside that night, realizing her cries were coming from the backyard, she ran around the side of the house towards me screaming and crying with knees bloody. I held her and asked her what happened. Through screams and sobs that was the story that came out Wild stuff!
While this story makes no sense I can see how she came up with it. The ladder that is usually up against the back deck wasn’t there. There were no steps at the time. My guess is she stepped where she thought the ladder should be and it wasn’t there. A few days earlier, when walking to the store with my teens, she sais she saw something funny in the sky. The older kids jokingly told her it was aliens. SO that explains the alien reference. The stars going dark? I’m not sure. It was dark out and perhaps she expected more light from the stars to see what she was doing. I am certain this was confabulation and not a thought out lie as there was only a moment or two between the time she fell and the time I got to her. Not enough time to think up a whopper like that one.
Since that time there have been many other confabulations that I will share in my next post, which will deal with confabulations and allegations.
As confabulations are caused by mistaken memories, mixed and matched events and sometimes wild imaginations there is little you can do about the stories besides correct the mistakes and help your child understand where the mistakes were made. This doesn’t always help when the confabulations are caused by fetal alcohol effects. My daughter strongly believes in many of her stories including those of non-existent friends living on farms whose horses she rides because she has imagined herself there so many times it has become real to her. Anger and discipline will not cure your child of confabulating as they not aware they are doing it. It is part of an executive functioning disorder not a behavioral issue. This one took me a long time to learn and hopefully you won’t put yourself through the wasted effort of trying to cure this as I did. It’s a part of FASD, not a defect in your child’s character.
Confabulation or a Lie?
Unlike confabulations, lies are given purposefully, and usually should be disciplined in some form. Lies are often much simpler than confabulations and once you understand confabulating you should sometimes be able to tell the difference. If for instance you see your child break a cup, hide the evidence and then tell you they didn’t do it, you have been lied to.
While I think lying should be disciplined so your child learns to stop, it’s an unfortunate truth that lying and bad decision making are often caused by impaired executive functioning skills. It may seem like a brilliant idea at the time to your child to lie. As an extreme example of impaired executive functioning: my daughter took one of her sister’s hamsters out of the cage and was playing with it. She got caught. My husband called to her “Do you have the hamster in your hand?” She yelled “No” and threw the hamster over the ledge of the stairs so he couldn’t see it. (The hamster lived).
It can be difficult to know when to discipline when so much of the behavior we are seeing is caused by organic brain damage. Some parents get fed up and discipline constantly while others let their children get away with everything, I think a good rule is to discipline when the behavior is purposeful. When our daughter lies about taking other people’s stuff, we do send her to her room and make her return the object. As her executive functioning and impulse control problems cause her to repeat behaviors we try to make it more difficult for her to gain access to things that get her in trouble. The older children have locks on their doors now to guard their belongings. The more you can control the environment and your child’s ability to act up in it, the less you will hear lies or have to discipline. Confabulations? You might always have to deal with these.
I’m beginning to think of medicating a fetal alcohol effected child like playing Wheel of Fortune. Open the new medication package, spin that wheel and see where we land. Occasionally we hit the jackpot, like when I discovered melatonin, and we can rest on our good fortune. Most spins, however, land on prizes that are really nothing special. They have a miniscule effect, but nothing to write home about. Sometimes the spin completely bombs. Like landing on Bankrupt and watching all your prize money disappear.
For us Straterra was that Bankrupt spin. My daughter went from hyper and aggressive, to ultra hyper and disinhibited. She jumped the baby gate at the top of the stairs to try and follow my husband to work. She stood on the back of his chair at the dinner table spitting in his hair. She chased her friends down the street screaming and crying because they didn’t give her a hug good-bye before heading home. All this happened within a two hour period the first day she tried the medication. Dexedrine was another. We saw virtually no effect from the medication when it was in her system, but once it began to wear off the crash was horrendous. She fell asleep in a restaurant at supper time, then cried for seven hours straight about everything. Both these medications have worked very well for other children
This is what researchers are hoping to prove. In two separate studies Dr.Brian Christie and Dr. Chris Bertram are hoping to prove that exercise and use of motor skills strengths can positively change the FASD brain.Dr Bertram’s study is to discover whether children with FASD can rewire their brains by utilizing their motor-based strengths. He and his team from Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada believe that children with FASD can improve the function of other areas of the brain by improving the brain functions of areas in which they have more strength. He calls it a transfer of learning or transfer of performance.
“Traditional intervention programs have these kids doing things their brains are not adept at doing, and their success rates are not great. We flipped things around and said, ‘Why don't we build intervention programs based on things they are good at.” - Chris Bertram
In a recent study in Canada it was discovered that as many as 80% of repeat violent offenders had a background consistent with FASD. This has led to a dialogue in the Canadian court system that will hopefully bring about change in how FASD offenders are treated. But can we as parents begin to bring about change before our children end up in the criminal justice system?
As hopeless as it sometimes seems, there are ways to help prevent violence in FASD children. This does not mean the child will change. , This means the environment in which we raise our children must be changed. This was something I had a difficult time coming to grips with. It seems even difficult for the professionals to understand. For a couple of years they kept coming up with ways that I could help Iaehsia change. With little impulse control, a low frustration tolerance level and comprehension problems on my daughter’s part, naturally these methods failed
Are our FASD children dangerous? This is a question I don’t like to face as a parent, but it is one I face every day. Since she is so young I don’t worry too much yet, but the danger signs are there. The rigid thinking, the impulsive actions, the rages that seem to sweep over her and turn her into a little person we do not know. I don’t know where these things come from. They are sudden and I like to think out of character, but they happen too often to just be part of a bad day. The rages are as much of her as are the sudden hugs, kisses and gifts of dandelions.
If I think back I see, and am sure other parents of violent fetal alcohol children can see, warning signs that began almost in infancy. As a baby, my daughter was cruel to other babies. It seemed cute and clever at the time. At 10 months old she was stealing soothers and bottles from other babies and throwing them out of reach. We were foster parents at the time and often had other babies in the home. I would laugh at her ingenuity, smile at her strength and hand the stolen item back to the other crying baby. Never once did I think, “This baby is a bully.” That’s not language we use when thinking of a baby
If there is something FASD parents seem to share in common, it is exhaustion. Raising a child with FASD is exhausting. We wake up tired. We spend the day tired. We make our way to bed as if crawling off a battle field. We all knew that special needs parenting, especially of an FASD child would be tiring. We just didn’t realize it would be THIS tiring.
Here are a few methods I have learned along the way to get the rest I need and have a little time to myself
Welcome to Fetal Alcohol Child. I started this blog for parents and helpers of children effected by fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), and for the children themselves. Mostly I began this blog for my adopted daughter who was born with FASD.
Raising a child with fetal alcohol syndrome or one of the many fetal alcohol spectrum disorders is challenging, exhausting, and sometimes heart breaking. It can also be one of the most joyful and worthwhile ventures we can ever embark on
I recommended writing for Hubpages and then I quit.
For the first few moths I was really happy with Hubpages. They have gotten user friendly down to a tee and the traffic was not bad.It seemed like a really good site to write for. As of the beginning of April I was finally starting to make some money there with a few adsense clicks and a couple of Amazon sales. I even joined a 60 day challenge of writing 30 hubs in thirty days and then doing a group promotion for 30 days of those pages. My hubber rating was 95 out of 100. All in all things were going pretty well for me there
No I wasn’t one of them,lol. It took me a while to figure out the craziness that was going on there. Still not sure who was/is who for a lot. Some, I just googled certain things and found enough info to figure out the alter egos.
Thanks for the tip. I keep wanting to try to cook healthier food and try out Indian cooking. With photos and step by steps I might just build up the courage.
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