Christmas will always be.

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Try if you can, to put aside the pressure to be the perfect family, celebrating the perfect Christmas. Not even Santa & his elves can help you create all of this!

The festive season brings challenges for all families & if you are living with children who have relational trauma, the challenges are even greater. Traumatised children need routine, predictability & regulation – so the ingredients of a ‘traditional’ Christmas – spontaneity, surprises, sensory overload & sugar – can lead to heightened anxiety for them & all those tricky behaviours that come with it.

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A Moffle Christmas Story

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a-moffle-christmas-story-2021Download

This Christmas Story was written in 2021 and we hope you enjoy it in 2022, whether for the first time or returning to it like an old favourite. The rhyming verse was inspired by Clement Clarke Moore’s, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, but this is a tale that acknowledges there can be anxiety & sadness for some children at Christmas, as well as joy. This story is dedicated to all the little Moffles who have mixed up feelings at Christmas & to the grown ups who love them.

Here is what Louise Michelle Bomber had to say about the story:

‘As an adoptive mum I know first hand how Christmas can be experienced ….a nervous, fearful anticipation of whether my little ones will be overlooked, forgotten or whether they too will experience the ‘magic’ that they have heard of. This beautiful offering gently holds those worries close. Mikenda again offers empathic insight into what some might not even notice ….thank-you’. 

Louise Michelle Bomber, Founding Director of TouchBase

Connection

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Children do best when they are in close, connected relationships with us. When we offer connection through our attuned presence & the communication of our empathy & our acceptance of them, children feel safe. When they feel safe, it frees them up to have the confidence to explore & to learn. They learn about themselves and others through the connected relationship.The way that they experience things when guided by an adult who they feel understands & appreciates them, determines how they learn to see themselves and the world.

Connection before correction really is essential. You cannot successfully have one without the other. Young minds are most receptive when we have first reached out to their hearts.

Anti Bullying Week

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Let us model for our children through our words & actions what it is to live with acceptance, empathy & kindness, both for ourselves and for others around us. Remember that they learn to see themselves and the world around them in relationship with us & through our eyes. There is no room for bullying when our hearts & minds are filled with love.

Something Else

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By Kathryn Cave

For Anti Bullying Week we are re-sharing the review of one of our favourite books!

In therapeutic parenting sessions, many adoptive parents and carers over the years have told me about how difficult it is for their child to make or keep friends. They speak of their sadness for their child never being invited for play dates or to birthday parties.

I often work with schools as part of the therapy plan, to help them think about how to support friendships for their looked after and adopted children. This regularly involves a lot of structuring of playtimes and lunchtimes and building up the circle of friends for the child slowly. Play skills can easily be taken for granted but are often so hard to grasp for children who have been traumatised. Putting in the work to help these children develop even one caring friendship can be life changing for them.

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