Scroll down to view Eric's Wednesday's Child video

If you have completed an adoption homestudy and would like to have your information forwarded to this child's worker, contact us.

While preteen ERIC (1/96) has lots of interests and knows how to have fun, a counselor at his group home was bowled over by Eric’s joyous, happy, and downright enthusiastic response to being videotaped by Robyn Nance for the Spokane "Wednesday’s Child" segment on KXLY, Channel 4. Throughout the preparation for the taping and then the taping itself, Eric was “just brimming with a (new found) confidence” and “showed a maturity he had not expressed before.” When the taping was over, Eric was “on top of the world.” His counselor said she had never seen him so centered and with such a good sense of self. After the feature is presented on TV in mid-June, interested families will be able to click on his story on www.NWAE.org and view the video on their computers.

For a kid who has had a really rough, unstable childhood, and who has behavioral and emotional issues that need to be addressed as he enters adolescence, the taping may have provided one of those moments of clarity where Eric was able to get an inkling of the boy inside of him that is beneath all the bluster and show. Bluster and show, aggressiveness, verbal threats and abusive language – all of these things help Eric to separate himself from others and dull the pain of grief, loss, anger, and abandonment.
In his current group home, Eric has a good level of structure and daily routine that helps him feel safe. He also has the emotional support of care givers and therapists who allow him the time and the space to feel trust in them and to form attachments. While Eric has shown that he can form relationships, it is a slow process that needs to be supported by adults who understand attachment and trust issues.

Group counseling and one-on-one therapy are routine parts of Eric’s mental health program; he also takes medication to help manage his short attention span and his emotions. Much of the focus of his therapy is to help Eric identify appropriate physical outlets for his anger, to assist him in learning to talk about feelings instead of acting them out, and to develop self soothing tools to help lessen his feelings of anger. Eric also needs very specific, clear, simple rules, limits, and consequences laid out so that he knows just what is expected of him. He benefits greatly, too, by having a caring, attentive adult nearby to prompt him, praise and reward good behavior and efforts, and assign timeouts when needed.

Eric needs to have parent(s) in his life who genuinely like teenagers, and who want to help make a difference in his life. Whether he has a single parent or a couple, his adoptive folk(s) should be skilled in understanding the special needs of children who have behavioral problems and poor anger management tools. Parents who have a variety of parenting tools and strategies, who are routinely calm, patient, and matter of fact in their dealings with teens, and who will hang in there over the rough patches will meet Eric’s needs best.


Subsidy and Purchase of Service may be available.

Return to Washington's Waiting Children index or see next child in Washington index.

View another state index: Alaska, Idaho, Oregon.

Copyright © 2008 Northwest Resource Associates. All rights reserved.