A Test-Drive

I spent my afternoon with ten foster children, ages 10 months to fifteen years. I was helping provide childcare for a foster parent training that ran from 9am to 4pm. I had signed on for the afternoon “shift,” since I had a meeting this morning that I couldn’t miss.

When I opened the door to the room where the kids were, the scene in front of me was utter bedlam. There was a movie playing loudly on a large tv screen, but no one was watching it. Most of the kids were running helter-skelter around the room, an eleven-year-old girl promptly informed me that she was “the boss” in charge of the children, and the two adults looked up at my entrance with faces full of relief and bewilderment. No one was bleeding or crying or fighting, but it was certainly a chaotic scene.

I did not usher in waves of calm and order as I stepped into the room, much though I would have loved to descend like Mary Poppins, instantly transforming each child from chaotic to cool and collected. But I did, unknowingly, gravitate toward the ‘problem child’ of the bunch (which is not to say she was a problem, she just happened to be more toward the end of her rope than the rest). I made a sort of one step forward, two steps back kind of progress with her; we played nicely for a while, then she would punch someone. We made funny faces in the mirror, then she smacked me in the face. We played duck-duck-goose, then she dumped an entire bottle of water on the slick concrete floor and proceeded to treat it like a slip n’ slide. I managed to gently grab her before she split her skull open, but only just. And all this while the other kids ran amok.

BUT. The TBRI techniques (which, ironically, the parents were learning in the other room) work. The rowdy, uncontrollable pre-teen boys? We had them do a spinning contest, carefully curtailed before exhaustion set in, then a push up contest followed by a crab walk race. By the end of this triathlon, they were calmly playing hangman or watching a movie.

The two wild children we took into the main building to run back and forth in a long hallway. They loved it, and it calmed them down in a way we never could have managed in the small, crowded main room. After running, balanced with breaks for deep breaths and some water, both were ready to sit and read with me in the room. And the fifteen year-old, an unbelievably sweet, shy guy, was brought in with the adults to help with some role-play and examples.

At the end of the day, I came away with some lessons learned.

1. Keeping any child content and calm in one plain room during a seven hour training is a challenge.

2. TBRI works. Over and over and immediately. Kids love it, and adults love implementing it.

3. Looking behind behavior is essential. The violent, uncontrollable child was really just stir crazy from being cooped up too long. Let her run off some energy in an empty hallway, and she’ll be ready to sit and read.

4. Working with children is absolutely exhausting. It just is. God bless all of you parents!!