Many adoptive parents, particularly those who adopted a traumatized child, have thoughts like, “My adoptive son/daughter is a nightmare,” on a regular basis. Unfortunately, because adoptive parents choose to adopt the children they do, many feel guilty about having these thoughts. I was one of them.

I cried and cried because I wanted to become a parent so badly. When I adopted, I thought I was adopting a healthy newborn baby. He was healthy at birth. However, likely because of prenatal “neglect” (no prenatal care for first six months) and “trauma” (exposure to cigarettes throughout pregnancy), my son developed both asthma and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). There are days (like today) when it does feel like raising my adoptive son is a nightmare.

When you adopt a child who has been traumatized after birth, the nightmare can become much more severe.

Dear Adoption Maharishi,

Thoughts on dealing with interfering grandparents? Our daughter was adopted from Russia when she was 2 years old. She is now 6 years old and has fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). My daughter has a therapist and my husband and I are working on building her ability to regulate emotions.

About 30 family members recently met at a lake for a picnic and to go fishing. My daughter started dysregulating because she couldn’t go fishing right away. She started yelling at my husband. We thought she was doing great. She was labeling her emotions and clearly communicating. This is great progress for her because she didn’t immediately dissolve into an emotional meltdown.

My father-in-law stepped in and started lecturing my daughter on her rudeness. He wagged his finger in her face and was very authoritative.

Both my husband and I were stunned. My daughter burst into tears.

We have shared my daughter’s neuropsy report with the grandparents. We have discussed over the years that we must parent our child differently. She isn’t getting away with anything.

How can we better handle this situation in the future? At this point we are thinking about avoiding the grandparents completely. There have been other issues of a similar nature with both sets of grandparents. They just don’t agree with how we are parenting our daughter.

- Frustrated

My son attends a Montessori school. Maria Montessori did not believe in giving children rewards for good behavior or for doing their work. She said that the "reward" is how good the child feels about himself for making good choices.

While I think that Maria Montessori was a brilliant woman and I love her method of instruction, I do not agree that rewards are always a bad thing. I have found that, in parenting an adopted child with special needs (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD), rewards can be a wonderful way to encourage good behavior.

What I have found is that my adopted child thrives on receiving positive attention, so a reward system to acknowledge good behavior has been very effective for him.