Six months ago, the Youth Hope team received a community referral regarding an adoptive mother supporting a young person with a significantly complex diagnosis and trauma history. It must be known that the adoptive mother is an incredible woman who would do anything in her power to support this young person, reduce his exposure to the juvenile justice system and avoid alternate care arrangements at any cost, and she had succeeded in doing this since his infancy.
At the time of the referral, this young boy was engaging in daily high risk, explosive, violent incidents, predominantly targeting the adoptive mother but also school staff, health practitioners and peers. The adoptive mother was forced to relocate from their home in suburbia to an isolated location, to ensure community safety. The young person refused to engage in traditional counselling or therapies and required intensive support and exemptions to safely engage in formal education, which was limited to 2 hours per day, 4 days per week. Despite this in-class support and reduced expectation, suspensions occurred frequently.
Any attempt made by the adoptive mother or formal practitioner to discuss the young person’s logic, emotions or behaviour was met with outbursts. The risk particularly to the adoptive mother cannot be understated. These incidents involved serious assaults and at times hostage scenarios using dangerous weapons. She was justifiably in fear of her life and forced to parent out of fear. Every minute of her life revolved around mitigating risk in relation to the young person, often at the expense of her own safety.
Upon Youth Hope engagement, the existing team of professional supports included a veteran psychologist, a specialist NDIS co-ordinator and a mental health social worker who had been the first practitioner to engage directly with the young person with success, undercover as a rock-climbing instructor. A Youth Hope caseworker and Youth Hope social worker, eager to join the team met existing stakeholders and, importantly, so did the adoptive parents who are separated.
Focusing on a strategy based around the child's needs at its core, family-centred goals were established. All stakeholders advocated for the young person’s successful transfer to an appropriate school setting with emphasis on his interests and strengths. Using their existing relationship, the psychologist advocated and mediated between adoptive parents, supporting consistency in the young person’s contact, rules and expectations between homes.
The Youth Hope social worker provided the adoptive mother with effective parenting, behaviour management and wellness strategies, support navigating behaviour management plans, supported her extended family with psycho-education on diagnosis and trauma and supported the adoptive mother to engage in valuable support groups. The Youth Hope caseworker quickly formed a connection with the young person while working on various woodwork projects on the property.
Over time the young person became comfortable with the caseworker and this connection evolved into a mentoring dynamic, where the caseworker was able to engage the young person in reflective discussions regarding daily challenges, positive connections, self-esteem, social skills and appropriate coping mechanisms. In time, the young person became comfortable with the adoptive mother participating in these preliminary discussions under the guise of a “toolbox talk”.
We are now at the halfway point of Youth Hope service provision, the young person is attending school Monday – Friday on full-time hours and catches a school bus with his peers most days. He recently and without incident attended a 3-day school camp. He has not had an incident involving threat or violence in three months, nor has he had a suspension during that period. He is engaging productively in mentoring sessions with the Youth Hope caseworker fortnightly and with his mental health social worker on the alternate week, along with extracurricular appointments such as guitar and surfing lessons.
He is comfortable independently discussing his daily challenges with his adoptive mother, who is then positioned to advise and support him accordingly. He enjoys the shared care of his adoptive parents which is close to 50/50. The young person is thriving and, as you can likely imagine, so is his adoptive mother who is incredibly proud to witness his development and growing independence. For the first time in a long while she says she knows what it is like to have a moment for herself, to take a week away on the water, and to give thought to her personal relationships or goals for the future outside of the care of the young person, who she will always prioritise.
The questions in the home have shifted from “how will we survive today?” to “where will our next holiday be?”