Book Review - The Connected Child

Written by Dr. Karyn Purvis and Dr. David Cross
Review written by Lisa Lovett, MSW, LICSW

An adoptive parent struggling in post placement to meet the needs of her new five year old son was the first to recommend The Connected Child to me. She told me that not only had she read this book and found it helpful, she had referred to it so many times that it was looking worn and tattered. I took her recommendation about the quality of the book seriously and, wanting to avoid the likely tattered pages in my own copy, promptly downloaded it on to an electronic reader. Since my first reading, I have recommended this book many, many times to both pre and post placement adoptive parents. It is a realistic yet hopeful exploration of parenting adopted children which offers insight into the child’s experience and practical advice for meeting the daily challenges of parenting.

The book starts with the premise that all adopted children come into their new homes having experienced trauma. The authors provocatively ask parents to imagine that a child that they have raised from birth is kidnapped and then returned to them several years later after suffering mistreatment. What, they ask, would parents be willing to give this child when he was returned to them and what would they expect of behaviorally from this child? The answer of course is that these parents would understand the potential of this child, from their years of parenting him, and that they would have great compassion for the trauma the child had endured and how it might affect behavior. In my work over the past twenty years with adoptive parents, I think the simple acceptance that a child was hurt and may not feel safe is hard for parents. They want desperately to believe that they have chosen a type of adoption, a country, or an adoption agency that was able to take good care of their child before he or she came home. It is too painful to imagine their child hurt whether in the womb, the birth family, the orphanage or simply over the many moves from one place to another. And yet, the very understanding of this hurt is what allows adoptive parents to begin their journey with the compassion they need to help their child.

In addition to stressing the importance of compassion, The Connected Child also asks parents to have curiosity about their new child’s behavior, to “solve the puzzle”. What are the connections between their child’s behavior and what may have happened to them prior to coming home? The obvious yet stark example in their book is a child melting down when denied a snack at close to the dinner hour. Even when this child can see the casserole in the oven, this denial of food may seem like a threat to safety if they have experienced grave hunger and been deprived of food. . In Chapter 4, “Disarming the Fear Response with Felt Safety”, Purvis and Cross talk about the importance of what they call “felt safety”. Felt safety is “when you arrange the environment and your behavior so your children can feel is a profound and basic way that they are safe”.

As important as compassion about the past and curiosity about behavior are to a parent, they are only useful if they lead to insight about how to actually help your child behaviorally. Fortunately, Purvis and Cross go beyond etiology in this book and provide clear strategies for parenting. While they are assert that children need “unconditional nurturing” which they contrast with ”performance based praise”, they also advocate for the parent to firmly and confidently discipline and teach new behavior. In their words, it is very important for the parent to be “the boss”. Most of their techniques are not complex. They suggest that parents establish eye contact, get down to the child’s level and use a respectful tone. They suggest limiting the amount of words and resisting the temptation to lectures and seeing misbehavior as an opportunity to teach a child new skills. They provide specific examples of behavioral challenges like a trip to the grocery store, a minefield for many parents. They show how to prepare a child for the trip, handle stumbling blocks and teach new behavior and they caution that a parent must be willing, for the sake of learning, to leave a cart of groceries behind. In addition to managing misbehavior, The Connected Child has chapters on ways to provide nurturance, handle setbacks and support healthy brain chemistry. It even gives a nod to the ways in which our background and wounds as parents affects our ability to parent our children. Although this is a critically important, the book overreaches a little here, attempting to cover such a broad and important topic in single small chapter.

The Connected Child is an excellent book for the pre-adoptive parent, the adoptive parent in their first year with their child or any parent trying to learn new strategies for handling misbehavior and teaching their child new skills. The book focuses primarily on toddler, pre-school and young school aged children and is less useful to parents of infant and teens. If the book has a weakness, it is that it is not grounded in the day to day realities of life outside the behavioral struggles of this particular child. There is little reference in this book to spousal relationships, siblings, work outside of parenting or other life stressors. One could argue, I suppose, that rather than being a weakness, this is simply a reflection of what it takes to parent a child who has been hurt. The rest of life necessarily recedes into the background as parents help a child become truly and deeply connected. This task of establishing connection is incredibly valuable and may be made just a little easier by the guidance provided by Purvis and Cross.