When we began our foster-to-adopt journey, I knew the children entering foster care had experienced difficult things.
What I didn’t understand was what that might actually look like once I became a parent.
We completed our foster care training. I’m sure trauma was discussed somewhere along the way. But if I’m being truthful, I don’t remember much of that part.
What I remember much more clearly came later.
Years later, I was still attending a regular foster and adoptive parent support group. We often had speakers come in, and some talked about trauma, early childhood experiences and the ways a child’s stress response can affect behavior.
By then, I was listening differently.
When Trauma Started to Make Sense
It’s one thing to hear someone talk about trauma before you’ve parented a child who has experienced it.
It’s another to hear those same ideas after you’ve sat beside your own child during a reaction you couldn’t explain.
By the time those speakers came to our support group, I had something I hadn’t had during our initial training: context.
I could connect what they were describing to real moments in our home.
And suddenly, trauma wasn’t just something that had happened in my daughter’s past.
Understanding it could help me parent her in the present.
A Child’s Story Can Begin Before Birth
One of the ideas I remember learning during that time was that a child’s story doesn’t necessarily begin at birth.
I had never really thought about how experiences during pregnancy might matter. But I learned that significant stress and adversity during pregnancy can influence a developing baby. Researchers are still learning exactly how those experiences influence later development, and they certainly don’t determine who a child will become.
That was new to me.
Before this, I thought about trauma mostly as something that happened to a child after birth—something they experienced and would later remember.
I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t that simple.
Too Young to Remember Didn’t Mean Too Young to Be Affected
Another thing I didn’t understand was the difference between remembering something and being affected by it.
When our daughter came to us at 18 months old, I remember finding comfort in the thought that she was so young.
She won’t remember any of this.
I was thinking about memory the way an adult thinks about memory—as a story you can consciously recall and tell.
What I hadn’t understood was that a young child doesn’t have to be able to tell you what happened for an early frightening or stressful experience to have affected them. Infants and young children can experience traumatic stress, even when they don’t have the words or memories to explain what they experienced.
That changed the way I thought about her earliest years.
Learning to Look Underneath the Behavior
As our daughter got older, things became even less clear-cut.
ADHD eventually became part of her story. So did anxiety.
Was a particular reaction ADHD? Anxiety? Something connected to her earliest experiences? Just being a kid?
I often couldn’t tell.
Around the same time, I was learning more about the body’s response to stress and danger—the reactions we often hear described as fight, flight or freeze.
That helped me look at behavior differently.
I started to understand that a reaction that seemed far too big for the situation in front of me might not be about that situation alone. Sometimes there could be more happening underneath a reaction than I could see from the outside.
I didn’t suddenly know what caused every behavior.
I still don’t.
But I began asking a different question.
Instead of only thinking, Why is she acting like this? I became more curious about what might be happening underneath the behavior.
That was a much bigger shift for me than memorizing a list of trauma symptoms.
If I could go back to the beginning, I don’t think I’d take better notes.
I’d tell myself to listen differently.
I wouldn’t try so hard to memorize what trauma might look like. I’d try to understand that my future child might react to the world in ways I couldn’t immediately explain—and that my job wouldn’t always be to figure out exactly why before I helped her through it.
I would learn so much more about trauma later.
Maybe I needed to be living some of those parenting moments before I could really understand what I was hearing.
I just wish I’d understood sooner how much it would change the way I saw my child.
If you’re parenting a child where emotions feel bigger than expected—or behaviors don’t quite make sense—you might also relate to:
- Why Everything Becomes a Battle With My ADHD Child
- When ADHD Meltdowns Don’t Make Sense
- The Parts of Parenting My Neurodivergent Child Most People Never See
If you’re navigating adoption or foster care—or trying to understand some of the things no one can fully prepare you for—you’re welcome to follow along. I share what I learned through our foster-to-adopt journey, including the things I wish I’d understood sooner.
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