Life has changed in another way in the last few days. In a good way.

For the last four years Tim and I have been beating ourselves up for our parenting. Even tho we have 8 other beautiful, kind, responsive, forgiving *fun* people we are raising/have raised, this one child gave severe doubt to us about our ability to parent well.

That's gone.

After talking to Bandy from Nancy Thomas' organization yesterday, we realize that our parenting has kept Jumoke from getting worse.

We have no tolerance for lying.  Jumoke lied rather than tell the truth. But that seems to have gotten much better since last fall. He has a lot more candor. Bandy was even surprised by it. That's a great thing for a RAD child.

We have no tolerance for children trying to kill other children. Laugh if you want, but this was a real thing when Jumoke came home. Of course, we told ourselves that he was only 4 and he wasn't *really* trying to damage anyone else, it was just his culture, blah blah blah. But that no tolerance thing helped us to train Jumoke into a place of no violent physical aggression, and that still pretty much remains the case. Another plus for a RAD child.

And to my husband's constant irritation, I talk about feelings all the time.  I start training my babies as soon as they are old enough to understand what their feelings are..."How do you feel right now? OK. That feeling is called sad. We all feel sad sometimes.  This is what people do when they are sad." 

When Jumoke came to us and didn't know ever how he felt, I began training him like I do our 3 year olds.  It was just a natural thing with me. 

Turns out that needing to understand and even *find* emotions other than rage is very important to a RAD child.  He can identify all four basic emotions: glad, sad, scared, mad.  He is mostly scared he says...scared of getting in trouble and someone making him stop...then mostly mad, then a little bit glad, and hardly ever but sometimes sad.

At least he recognizes emotions and can name them.

And to give Tim credit so that no one thinks he's a big meanie (which, oh! he is not), he said to me yesterday, "I was wrong. You did well. I'm glad you didn't stop doing that just because it annoyed me."

So we find that not only did we not make him worse, but with boundries and our own natural strengths, we have been able to maybe help him heal a little bit...without even knowing what we were dealing with.