Foster Parent Well
Foster Parent Well is the go-to podcast for foster and adoptive parents who are navigating the complexities of parenting children with trauma while trying to stay sane in the process. Hosted by Nicole T Barlow, a foster and adoptive mom of six, parent trainer, and wellness coach, this podcast is where faith, resilience, and practical strategies come together.
If you're feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, or just plain exhausted from the daily realities of foster care and adoption—you're not alone. Here, we have real conversations about the hard stuff: attachment struggles, secondary trauma, parenting beyond behaviors, and the deep emotional weight of loving kids from hard places. But we also talk about you—your health, your nervous system, your faith, and the small, sustainable ways you can care for yourself so you can keep showing up for your kids.
Expect practical tips, faith-based encouragement, expert insights, and zero sugarcoating—just real, honest talk about what it takes to foster well, adopt well, and most importantly, stay well in the process.
Because parenting kids with trauma is a marathon, not a sprint—and you were never meant to run it alone.
🎧 Subscribe now and let’s do this together!
Foster Parent Well
Breaking the Cycle: Parenting with Trauma Awareness with April Ficklin
What happens when the romanticized dream of adoption crashes into the complex realities of parenting children from trauma? April Ficklin knows this collision intimately. From a teenage mission trip where she first felt called to adoption, to the Good Friday when her family doubled overnight with the addition of two siblings from foster care, April's journey has been one of profound transformation.
The chaos was immediate. Despite years of successful parenting with her biological children, April found herself utterly unprepared for the behaviors that emerged from her adopted children's fear responses. "I'm not the parent I used to be. I'm not the parent I thought I would be. I'm definitely not the mom I want to be," she remembers thinking during those early days.
This raw conversation peels back the layers of what trauma-aware parenting truly demands. April shares how she discovered that traditional parenting methods focused on compliance and behavior correction were failing both her children and herself. The breakthrough came when she shifted her entire approach from changing behaviors to building trust - recognizing that she needed to prove her trustworthiness before expecting her children to trust her.
Now working as an adoption professional and raising four teenagers, April offers a message of hope grounded in reality. Healing happens, but it's measured in moments like when her once fiercely independent child said, "Mama made me a peanut butter sandwich. That's what mamas do." Those small victories reveal the power of connection-based parenting that values relationship over compliance.
Whether you're considering adoption, in the trenches of foster parenting, or simply want to understand trauma-responsive approaches better, this conversation offers both practical wisdom and heartfelt encouragement. The journey may not be what you expected, but the healing – for both you and your children – is worth every step.
Please connect with April by following her growing Instagram account where she shares encouragement for stressed out moms, tips for trust-based parenting, and stories to help create hope in the overwhelm. https://www.instagram.com/april_ficklin/
The Connected Child: https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001
TBRI: https://child.tcu.edu/about-us/tbri/#sthash.3OROkCJX.dpbs
Nicole's 5 Day Belly Blast Challenge: http://www.fasterwaycoach.com/5-day-belly-blast-2025?aid=nicolebarlow
I'd love to hear from you! Send me a text!
Connect with me on Instagram: @Fosterparentwell
@nicoletbarlow https://www.instagram.com/nicoletbarlow/
Website: https://nicoletbarlow.com/
Welcome to the Foster Parent Well podcast, where we have real candid, faith-filled conversations about all things foster care, adoption and trauma. I'm your host, nicole T Barlow. I'm a certified parent trainer, a certified health coach and an adoptive parent myself. This is a space where you can find support so that you can care for your kids with a steadfast faith, endurance and joy. I want you to, Nicole T Barlow. We are going to jump right in today because my guest, april Fricklin, has so much value to share. We're going to be talking about becoming trauma aware as we parent. April is a TBRI practitioner, she's a former high school English teacher and she's a mom of four teens whose family grew through adoption over eight years ago. Well, welcome to the show, April. I'm so excited to have you on today eight years ago. Well, welcome to the show, april. I'm so excited to have you on today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in adoption.
Speaker 2:Awesome, yes, so I am so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me, nicole. So I actually really began to think about adoption as part of something I was interested in doing in my life way back when I was a teenager, and so at that point I was 15 or 16 years old and I attended a short-term Bible study not Bible study mission trip, sorry in Providence, rhode Island, which I think now is such irony.
Speaker 1:Providence. Yes, that we were in the city of.
Speaker 2:Providence right, and while I was engaging with the children there, while I was serving there, I just felt this really strong pull from God that adoption at some point would be part of my life. It wasn't anything in particular that was happening. I remember the one vision I have from that trip was spending time with some children in a playground and pushing them on a tire swing, and so that little symbol of a tire swing has always kind of just stuck in my mind of just remembering this calling that God kind of put on my life way before I knew what things were going to look like and how that was going to evolve, so it just kind of stayed there in the back of my mind for years and years. My husband and I we started dating in our early 20s and from the very beginning I let him know that this was something I was thinking about. This was something I felt like God was leading me to, so this needed to be something that we were on the same page about at some point.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. So I'll let you know. So I train, I do pre-service training for foster and adoptive parents and I am always super surprised about how many parents that we have come through and they say, like this was part of the conversation on our first date, because I knew that we were, that this was the direction that God had for me and so this person needed to be on board. So I just love that. I love, I love people that have the, that vision that God has given that them that vision ahead of time, and that they put that on the table from the very get go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was definitely something really important to me. But it's nice because in our relationship I am kind of the green light and my husband is kind of the yellow light, you know, and so he's always helps me kind of gauge how quickly I move into things. So it wasn't something we jumped immediately into, but it was something that over the years God aligned our hearts at the right time for us to be able to do. So we didn't jump into adoption immediately after getting married, but several years into our marriage we began having children and growing our family. So we have two biological children.
Speaker 2:So they came first, and when they were young, elementary school kids, we decided that the time was right for us to take the steps to look into adopting through foster care, adopting through foster care. And so we did that, and we learned really quickly that everything that had been romanticized in my head about adoption all of those years was something really different from the reality of it. And so in that process God kind of made it clear to me that this was going to be something that was going to be really hard in a lot of ways, but he also promised a lot of joy, and so that's definitely been fulfilled in what we've experienced over the last year. So it was actually nine years ago today that our two children moved in to our house, Um, so we adopted a brother and a sister from foster care and um kind of grew our family that way. So we had four kiddos, um, all school aged. It happened on good Friday of 2016. We went from two to four overnight, Um, and then it was immediate chaos.
Speaker 1:I bet now okay, so a couple of questions about y'all's journey. Did y'all know that you were going to adopt them? Were they an adoptive placement or were they? Did you start out with foster care as a reunification case? And how old were your adopted kiddos when you um, when they were placed with you, versus your biological kids? Cause I think people always like to know. You know kind of what those dynamics look like when people get started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we um no, we never fostered, so that wasn't ever the calling that we felt. So we went into it knowing that we would be adopting and kind of opened our options up to considering taking at least two children One, because my two biological children were very close and I didn't kind of I didn't want like an odd man out, you know. So if we just took in one child, I was kind of afraid it would create this weird dynamic. And so, even though we didn't necessarily feel equipped to double, double the children in the home, we felt like that might be the best option for us. Um, so my biological children were in third and first grade when we decided to adopt. It was a conversation we had as a whole family.
Speaker 2:The process of licensing actually took us a while. We had to wait a really long time to get our home study done with an investigator and our children moved in and they were four and almost six, so they fell in line really closely and my biological children stayed in the birth order originally. So that did help the transition a lot. But they're also all very close in age. So there's a five-year span between the four of them. So they're pretty close in age. So right now they're all teenagers. I have four. I have a house full of teenagers.
Speaker 1:I kind of like that. Like my kids are. Like that, we have a set. I have six kiddos and we have a set of big kids. We have three big kids and three little kids and my three big kids are all really close in age and my three little kids are. I mean, my girls are only 10 and a half months apart, so, like my littles are, are really close, um, together. And I like it because my, my kids have each other to play with and and you know, to be friends with and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a. We call them the bigs and the littles too, so we were able to differentiate that and it's nice that they had each other. It was also nice that they were able to stay together being siblings, so that was something that felt really special to us to be able to be able to give them that. I mean, they lost so much in those transitions of their life, but we were able to give them the home to stay together, so that was really special to us.
Speaker 1:I love that. Now, how long had they been in foster care before they came to you?
Speaker 2:They had been in care for. Let me remember I think it was around maybe total, close to two years, and they were so since we had gone into the process. So, since we had gone into the process planning to adopt, their case had already gone through TPR and the appeal process, and so we didn't have to walk that part of the journey and, in fact, even though our licensing took a while, the adoption itself was almost like a miracle from God as far as how quickly it went compared to how most things go in this realm. And so they moved in and the adoption was finalized six months to the day, so basically, as quickly as it could go, that part of the journey went really quickly and smoothly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for those of you that don't know, I think in most states and this may vary from state to state, but in most states you have to foster a child for six months before you can finalize the adoption. So that child has to live with you for at least six months before you're able to finalize that adoption. So that is super fast. If you're doing it six months to the day, yeah, that's really fast. But how great for them that they didn't have to spend more time in that transition, because I think sometimes the transitions are super hard for our kids. Well, okay, so you go through this adoption process super fast. What was life like after adoption? Like yay, your house just doubled.
Speaker 2:Yes. So you know we were. It was. We were very excited. We were really looking forward to this transition. All of us were very excited.
Speaker 2:But I very vividly remember they moved in on Good Friday, so it was a Friday night right before Easter and we spent the day shopping and making sure we were prepared for them. We knew the things that they liked. We had done several visits getting the house prepared. But I remember waking up on Saturday morning and quite transparently thinking what in the world have we just done? Because already out in the living room from our bedroom I already heard the chaos. So from going from the two to four literally overnight, just created so much new energy in the house and it really didn't take long before we realized that the needs, meeting the needs of our kids, was going to look different than what we expected. Um, and we didn't have the answers to that for a long time, quite honestly. But because things didn't go the way that the romanticized, idealistic idea in my head had been, we really started to hit some challenges when it came to whether our parenting was really effective for meeting the needs of our kids. So that was really hard in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how much training did you guys get heading into this adoption?
Speaker 2:Not a lot. I remember two days. We had two days of training, kind of spread out. I don't even remember a whole lot of details. I do remember a little bit of kind of like hey, you could have these big behaviors, make sure you know what you're doing before you walk this road. But I don't remember a lot of practical tools about what was going on or what in my mind.
Speaker 2:I knew the kids would have some fear right, that makes sense, like they're transitioning to a new home. We're basically strangers, even though we're excited. I understood there'd be some apprehension, there'd be some fear. But what I didn't understand is what that fear would look like and how it would manifest and so where I was in this belief that the fear would be. You know, they might be scared at night when it was time to go to bed, or maybe they would be shy, those kinds of things. I wasn't prepared for the fear coming out in behaviors, yeah, and that was really shocking to me. And because the chaos kind of doubled in parenting, all of a sudden I found myself like a deer in headlights of trying to figure out how to navigate the new behaviors that were coming out of that baseline of what was really fear in my kids, but I didn't understand that for a really long time.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, that's really hard. So, like I said, I do the pre-service training for foster and adoptive parents in our area and you know there are some. I try to be very transparent, like I try to give the worst of the worst so that they see, like you know, this is how this could look. But I still think, when you go through that process, how this could look. But I still think, when you go through that process, if you've never seen it in your home, if you don't know how it feels, if you don't know what it looks like in a specific child, there's no, there's nothing tangible you can kind of latch onto. You know, we actually at the agency that I trained for, we actually just created a training for where we kind of filmed pre-service training for people to watch afterwards, because it's like afterwards is when you're like, oh, this is what it looks like.
Speaker 1:Now I need some tools. I need some tools Now. I need to know how to implement these things, because it's really hard to prepare parents ahead of time, especially, I think, when parents do kind of enter in a lot of times with these romanticized ideas of what it's going to look like, and sometimes I will say stuff and I can see it in parents' eyes. They're like oh, that's not going to be me, right? Like, okay, well, we'll talk to you in six months, we'll talk to you in a year and let me know, but and it may not Do you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1:Like it doesn't look the same for everybody's journey, but I do think that people kind of go into it not really expecting you know what is to come, what is to come. And one of the things I really try to help parents with is not give them necessarily all the practical tools and how to implement every single little thing, but where to go. What kind of information do they need to search for, who do they need to connect with? What books do they need to read? Those sort of things so that they know where to turn when things get crazy. So where did you go? Right, like if you, if you're entering into this and not expecting what is happening or what you're seeing or what you're feeling in your home, right then, where did you turn at that point?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. So at first, honestly, we just kept pulling out the same tools that we knew that had worked well with our parenting thus far. We've been parenting for I don't know nine or 10 years, and so that was going okay. We felt pretty good about ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:And so, even when those strategies weren't working great, we didn't really know what other tools to pull out, and so for a long time we kept using those same tools and kind of beating our head against the wall, realizing something that's got to give. Something has to change because this is not working and I'm not the parent that I used to and I'm not the parent that I used to be. I'm not the parent that I thought I would be in this moment and I'm definitely not the mom that I want to be, um, and so I um did a lot of praying at first. Um eventually began to find some resources, first online. So I remember very vividly coming across Jason Johnson, who's with CAFO, and he had a blog post at the time about secondary trauma, and it was one of those instances where I read it and I was like, oh, like, there's not, like this is not me, this is not just me, I'm not the only one with this struggle. This is something that happens when we care, give um, to children who have these complex um issues that they that they had to deal with early in life. And so he was one of the first voices that I kind of came across, that put pieces together that made sense for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I also remember listening to a radio show I believe it was focused on the family where an adoptive mom was sharing about this 45 minute battle she had with her child about filling up their water water bottle one day and I was like, oh, that's just like this thing that just happened in my house with reading a book for homework. And so I started just kind of having these little pieces of the puzzle start to fill in where I recognized, okay, it's not that I'm just doing something wrong, it's that this is a different thing, that I recognize and that the tools and strategies that I have that have been successful for me before they just aren't the right tools for this new job. And so I had some fellow adoptive moms introduce me to the Connect2 Child within the first year or so of our adoption and I read that and I'll be honest about it when I first read it I was skeptical of a lot of what I was reading. I learned some great information from my first read through of that book, but I was also like I don't know. This feels really different than how I was parented. This feels really different than what's worked so far I don't know about this, and so it was a slow progression to be able to embrace some of those more trust building, attachment focused parenting strategies that ultimately have made the biggest difference in our parenting for sure.
Speaker 2:But some moms introduced me to that resource. We joined a small group with other foster adoptive moms. That was life giving. It was probably the only way we survived after those first couple of years, because we were just able to sit into a in a room where I learned the importance of the head nod right when I would explain you know, like this, this just happened in my house and I don't understand what this is going on and the other moms in the room would just nod their head and I'm like wait, wait, wait, wait you, this happens in your house too. And they would say, absolutely so. It just gave me that comfort of knowing, okay, this is something more than I have understood, but that doesn't mean that I can't figure this out and that there aren't tools available to us. So that's kind of where the journey of learning how to parent a little differently began is kind of finding those resources.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Yeah, I do think that that empathy that we get from other parents and the understanding of people that are in it with us makes a huge difference, because when you're talking to regular, you know people that aren't in this world. You may say something that is going on in your home and it's just a blank stare.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Because they they have that doesn't make sense to them, that is so outside of their comfort zone that they don't even know how to respond sometimes, and and so I do think that community makes such such a big difference, such a big difference. Well, okay, so you're going through all of these changes, right, but what's going on in your heart during this time, right, have, mentally, we're going through this game where we're trying to figure things out and prepare and, you know, kind of orchestrate our home and get it back to order and become the parent that we want to be in all the things. And I think a lot of times we do those things in our head but we aren't paying attention to what's going on in our heart. So, what was going on in your heart during this time, during this season, and how did this translate into your faith?
Speaker 2:So I think there were several things that I was really wrestling with in my own heart in the beginning of the journey, and one of those was, pretty early on, feeling some grief. That was unexpected, right. So things weren't going the way that I anticipated that they would go. We had found ourselves, before the adoption, in a pretty easy parenting season, like we felt like things were going well and it was fun and we just wanted to, you know, slide in um two more to join the fun and, um, the transition just wasn't as as easy as we wanted it to be and the attachments didn't come as quickly as I had dreamed up in my head, and so I began to feel that grief, but also just also let myself, um, grieve the expectations that I had had, so that I could open my heart up to accept the reality, cause it wasn't necessarily a bad reality, it was just a different one than what I had expected. Um, so that was definitely one of the things I was wrestling with, but I was also wrestling with some arrogance, to be honest. Um, like I said, parenting was going well for us, so we kind of thought we knew what we were doing. We got accolade from the people around us, even walking into the adoption, people would say they've got really good kids. Do they know what they're doing? I'd have people warn me that you know this. You know this might be something that would be detrimental to our family. Things were already going well. So I mean, we felt like we were good parents and things had gone well.
Speaker 2:And so when things weren't working the way that I wanted them to in my parenting, it was a while before I was willing to see that it was my responsibility to change my approach, and I desperately wanted a change. I was willing to do hard work, but I just didn't know what that was, and so I kept walking in the same parenting that I had done for years, and it took humility to be able to say, okay, this obviously is not working, I've got to figure something completely different out. And so my husband and I actually did many, many, many miles of walking up and down the street in front of our house. We couldn't leave the house long enough to go actually do a real walk right, because we had four children. But we'd walk up and down and as I would read things and as I would learn and as I got introduced to Karen Purvis, with trust-based relational intervention and the Connected Child, and those things. I would just we would talk through them and say, like I read this, I heard that this is the case. You know, this is what happens when a child has experienced trauma. This is what their brain does. Do you think we need to change things in this way? You know? So we'd have those kinds of conversations where we really had to break down what we felt confident in and recognize that we need some supernatural changes to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that was definitely a piece the grief, the arrogance, and then the other thing that was really unexpected was the isolation. I felt really lonely and the difficult parenting and the loneliness were so heavy that, when it came to my faith, what I found was I would look at my Bible sitting on my nightstand and it just seemed too heavy to pick up. I was exhausted. At the end of the day, I was mentally exhausted. Um, I didn't want to process scripture. I didn't want to figure out how it applied to my life. Um, it just felt really heavy, and so I clung to scripture that I knew. Um, that became important to me in this season because it never really resonated before, and it's the scripture in Romans where it talks about the spirit will moan on our behalf. And so I just accepted that, like so I didn't. I didn't feel like I was having a crisis of faith, I didn't feel like I was far from God. I actually felt very close because I knew I was not able to do this on my own Right. So, um, and I knew God had orchestrated the process of the adoption in a way that I couldn't deny it, and so I held onto that hope and that understanding that he had that providence all along, that he had orchestrated those things. Um, but man life was so heavy that it was hard to dig in. Um, so I just clung to knowing that the spirit was was praying on my behalf. The spirit was going to God on my behalf.
Speaker 2:And so in those moments when I was feeling really isolated, I had this Sunday morning and Sunday morning taking four kids to church not always fun anyway and during the greeting part of the worship, a woman who was sitting behind us we were acquaintances, I knew her, but we weren't close looked me in the eyes and said I've been praying for your family every day. And she was really the first person. I mean like we had all of these people who supported us and who loved us and they were very excited that we were adopting and they loved the process. But I find that people on the outside sometimes make assumptions that once the adoptions finalize, that the healing has happened when those of us on the inside recognize that's just the beginning. Right, that's the beginning of the hard work of healing that really is going to last a really long time. Right, that's the beginning of the hard work of healing that really is going to last a really long time.
Speaker 2:And so people saw that life was different. But they didn't understand it and it got a little messy and it got a little hard, and so people kind of some people pulled away and some people got really confused and some people got offended because we missed things or things were different than before. Yeah, but this woman reminded me that that's the kind of thing I needed, was I just needed to know that there were people who were like man, that looks really hard and I'm praying for you. So that really lit a passion in me as I was able to kind of pull out several years later out of kind of the what I felt like was the adoption fog, um, and be able to find ways to support other mamas who were feeling that same need for that intercessory prayer. It became really important part of how I wanted to give back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's so, so important. But I think that if you are on the outside, if you don't know and I love that you're giving back in this way now because you do know Right, but if you don't know, our families on the outside can just look like regular families, right, and people don't know the battle that is going on all day, every day. And I don't mean the battle between us and our kids, right, but the fight for healing, the fight for restoration for our kids, the fight for healing and restoration in our whole families, right, and so, as all of that is happening, it is, it is a battle, and I think having those people on the outside that can be fighting with us is really, really, really important and I love that. You know the Lord prompted her to see your family in that way, to see that need and to be praying for you guys. That's awesome. To be praying for you guys, that's that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, so so you flipped kind of the script of of how you were parenting, right. You latched on to Karen, purvis and TBRI type stuff. How did that change things? What tools really helped you transition? What was it that made the biggest changes for both your kids and their healing process, but also for you as a parent.
Speaker 2:So in the beginning, as I mentioned before, a lot of the fear, the impact of trauma, those types of things came out in behaviors that shocked us, that surprised us and that worried us. And so at first I felt like it was my job to change behaviors. Right, I wanted these behaviors changed. But over time what I recognized was that I really needed a mindset shift, and that began to happen in my parenting. So for one, I recognized that what I had envisioned my goal of parenting was might need to change a little bit, and so traditionally, in traditional parenting, we kind of look at our role as being okay. As the parent. We are here to help guide, teach, create expectations, help our children behave or, you know, have certain behaviors that fit into the culture so that as adults they can be good citizens of the world, right, they can have jobs and relationships and be successful and and those things. And so that was just kind of the mindset that I had in my parenting. But I had to kind of recognize that at the end of the day, for my children, what I really wanted and what I think was going to be most impactful for them was that when they are 25 and they make a mistake, that they're still connected to me enough. This is where they come back to that they don't have to go out into the world to find other ways to solve the problems that they face, that they have a home base. They have a foundation in us because we have built a relationship, and so that change in my mindset about parenting then helped me understand my day-to-day parenting then had to be focused less on changing behaviors and more on creating trust, and it's not something that I had ever been intentionally doing day-to-day with my biological children, because the natural progression of our relationship built the trust organically and I just kind of missed that.
Speaker 2:I had a disconnect when my adopted children moved in. That that was lacking right, Because I knew how I felt about them. I was excited, I fell in love with them, I was protective immediately, but we didn't have this trust relationship back and forth and they didn't trust me. They didn't have any reason to trust me. They had every reason not to trust me, quite honestly, and so I had to learn that the parenting then had to look like what do I do to build trust?
Speaker 2:And in traditional parenting we're often focused on what the child has to do to build trust. You know you have to earn trust so that you can get privileges and so that you can have independence. And if you don't do those things. But I had to flip that on its head and realize no, that was my job first. My job first was I had to prove to them they could trust me at my word. They could trust that I was going to stick around. They could trust that when things went awry we were still going to stay connected to each other. And so it didn't come all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:It's been years long of a journey of figuring out then what does that look like in the moment? So, when there is a behavior, when there is something we have to correct, what does that look like in the moment? And and so it's looked kind of honestly, a little crazy compared to what I expected parenting to look like a lot of times, when I will make decisions in the moment to deal with an issue that's happening in our family in a completely different way than I ever would have done seven years ago, Because I put at the forefront of my mind that at the end of the correction, what I want most is that I have built more trust, Because it's that trust that's going to change behavior. I can get compliance, but compliance does not necessarily change the behavior and that's really what I wanted, and I wanted that connection with my kid their whole lives.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, well and we talked about that a couple of on the podcast a couple of weeks ago where, you know, a lot of times we're seeking compliance for our own felt safety, because compliance and order and our kids doing what we tell them to do actually us having that control makes us feel safe instead of making our kids feel safe. Well, so I have a question, though, about how this works in the church, right, because I think a lot of times it comes up with people within the church like this is permissive parenting? This is not biblical. You know that kind of stuff. How do you address that kind of stuff? Or do you address it? Do you just parent the way that you want and just kind of let comments slide?
Speaker 2:I think I mean we don't have a lot now. Now, in the beginning we had a little bit of like people poking their heads in what was going on, because it definitely looked different and the parenting had to happen. You know, a lot of times our children who've had a really difficult past, but developmentally they're not living in their chronological age, so they may look like a 10-year-old but they may be operating like a 6-year-old, and so you have to parent the development of the child, not necessarily the chronological age, and so that looks different. But we haven't had a whole lot of people poking their heads in, but we do have our own mind mess. I think that happens based on what we've experienced in our culture. So and we both grew up in the church and so that was really instilled in us, that kind of traditional, faith-based parenting. But what I love about what I've learned about a more trust-based parenting is that it is very gospel centered, because it's a lot about restoring relationship, it's about redemption, it's about grace, it's about forgiveness and second chances and really a lot more than what we were doing before.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the parenting that we were doing before hinged on this idea that we have to punish behaviors in order to change them. And those punitive ideas, those punitive responses weren't ones that we necessarily intentionally wrapped connection around, and so a lot of times what was happening was, as we tried to correct behaviors, we were also creating disconnection at the time. So there wasn't this alignment of our hearts with our child, of being on the same path together. It wasn't intentional. We had, we did the best we could with what we knew, right, Like that's what we knew. We love our children. We loved our children Even when we were missed.
Speaker 2:What we consider was messing things up at the time, needing a transition in our parenting, but it definitely wasn't as connected as what we're trying to be now, and so it's definitely not permissive parenting, because what we're looking for is a balance of how can I nurture the need of my child, especially a child whose needs did not get nurtured for a long time, how do I fill the gap between what they missed and where we are now? But also how do I create good structure, because the structure piece is also important for their felt safety. Yes, connection is important for felt safety, but so is structure. The boundaries are really important, one of our children in particular. We always talk among my husband and I with ourselves that, like, we can just tell a difference in this child when we hold a really good boundary for them because they feel safe in that boundary that we've created through relationship.
Speaker 2:So it's all relational, it's not permissive. It's all relational, it's not permissive, it's just relational. It's making sure that at the end of the day, even if we've had a conflict, if we've had a rupture in our relationship, if we've had to come down with a consequence, that we are also staying connected to that child and that we're not staying in a punitive mindset that is going to have a tear in the relationship. So you know we have high expectations, but we've learned to scaffold our child to get there if they need to, rather than just keeping the expectation there and constantly seeing a child fail to make it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:We actually, I think in our home anybody that knows me or our home, our family, how our family runs I don't think anybody would say that we're permissive, because we are actually much higher structured, especially for our younger kids. We have a lot more structure than the traditional family. My kids have a lot more boundaries because they need those boundaries. That helps them feel safe and it helps them succeed. But you do have to be. When you have this high structure like that, you have to be higher nurture and I do think when parents end up digging in, when people in the church end up digging into this, it is so gospel centered Like this is how God operates and it is how he calls us to parent.
Speaker 1:There's a scripture in Ephesians 6 that says children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right, all the things right. But then it says fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. Well, our kids that have experienced harm are going to more quickly be provoked to anger because of their fear response, and so it is our job as the parent to tailor how we parent to not provoke that child to that. It is our job to stay relationally connected and safe for them so that we're not constantly provoking them to that anger response which is biblical. But it's so funny because I think a lot of times in the church people don't necessarily understand what we're doing and why.
Speaker 2:Yep, and you know, mentioning that fear response, one of the things I had to learn was I was actually perpetuating a lot of the behaviors from how I was responding and so when I learned that what I needed to do and I talked to parents about this a lot as well in our coaching that I had to become the person who disarms. So what can I do to disarm in the moment, so that my child has an opportunity to respond in an appropriate way? Because if I immediately add fear on top of fear, then I'm not going to get the response I want from my child. I'm going to get those behaviors like lying and sneaking and stealing. But if I can disarm them with even my tone of voice and my posture and, you know, affirmation to them, then I'm much more likely to get what I want when it comes to behavior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I always say that like I have to joke around with my kids. If I say something kind of serious to them, then I have to be like you know and kind of give them a thumbs up or a goofy smile or a laugh or a wink or something afterwards to kind of take them out of that, to help them understand that relationally, we're still good that I am holding you accountable for something in the moment, but that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong, you know, relationally with us. Well, now you have teens, right Like. So now all of these kids are grown up, how has this shifted in your home and what has that healing process look like, both for your kids and for you, as you have?
Speaker 2:you know, as the years have gone by, so, you know, adolescence brings with it its own challenges, but also its own joys, and so I was talking with a friend today who saw some pictures recently that we posted on social media, and she was, like you do such fun things with your kids. Is it really that fun, like? Is it as fun as it looks? Right? And sometimes it is. There is a lot of joy. I told you God promised me that there would be, but there is a lot of hard work, and a lot of hard work has come to get to the point where we can really enjoy each other still at this age, and so my children range from 18 to 13 now, and we have seen a lot of growth.
Speaker 2:One of the keys that has really helped my husband and I as parents is to reflect together verbally often about what changes we've seen, because a lot of times you can feel like you're really still stuck in a lot of the same places, like okay, like we're still dealing with lying or we're still dealing with stealing or we're still dealing with these behaviors. But if we reflect back to where we've come from, yes, we're still have some things that we're working on, but man, we've come a long way. Um, and so one of the biggest changes that just confirms for me that this is the type of parenting that God wants me to do and that this is the type of parenting that God will use to heal um in my home is that, um, we have, I have children who now are able to come to me and with, faced with a difficult situation, they can much more quickly get to the truth, right, they can tell me what's really going on much faster than we used to Just a few months ago. So, so, one of my children was fiercely independent when they moved in, and we had this pattern at that point of reading bedtime stories every night, you know, one-on-one with the kids, and this child often insisted on reading the book themselves, which, at the time, I was like well, this is fantastic, right, they love reading, they're embracing this time, yeah.
Speaker 2:As I look back years later, I recognize, though, that that was a symptom of that child's inability to be able to easily receive my nurture and care. And so, just a few months ago, this same child I was making lunch for the kids, and I just was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and, for some reason, to one of the siblings, they said mama made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's just what mamas do and I thought, man, what a tiny little glimmer of where we've come in our attachment. Because my husband and I were willing to say, okay, what we're doing is not working anymore and recognize that we needed something different, and because we've focused on building that trust and building that felt safety, giving the nurture and the care really intentionally.
Speaker 2:Even these little things began to demonstrate to the children that this is what family is right, this is what it feels like to receive care from someone. So this child, who wouldn't let me read to them, now recognizes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a symbol of our attachment, our love for each other. So we've been able to see some of those. You have to kind of look for those little glimmers of where the healing has happened, but it does come. It's a journey, but it definitely comes.
Speaker 1:Sure, but it is not immediate and it doesn't happen at the judge's gavel kind of thing, right Like it does.
Speaker 1:It does take time, and to even you know, hear from you all these years later, that y'all still see behaviors, that you still see fear, responses, that you still see all these things, I think is actually hopeful for parents that we're not stepping into this and we're failing in our job, that our kids haven't healed automatically, but that it is supposed to be a lifelong process. It's not something that's supposed to heal automatically. I know that's something with my own journey that has been reflected back to me, like I still see glimpses of healing that needs to happen in me from things that have happened along the way. You know, years and years and years in my childhood, and so you know to know that there's still those spaces in me, that, but that God's revealing those things in all of us all along the way, I think is beautiful. What do you think, as we wrap up like? What do you think, though, the biggest thing that God has done for you on this journey?
Speaker 2:So I really think, similar to what you were just mentioning, right Like what we recognize is, we go into this journey knowing that healing needs to take place, that we have children who've experienced harm that they never deserved, that has impacted who they are. But I think the surprising piece is that God uses the steps that you're taking in order to facilitate healing for your family, also begins to create healing for yourself. I mean, we all have things in ourselves where, um, you know, we may not recognize where our weaknesses are. Um, and one of the trainings that I did for TBRI, um, one of the trainers said um, your triggers are your issue, and I was like Whoa, hold on, I don't like that. That's not what I signed up for.
Speaker 1:I don't like that.
Speaker 2:Right, that is, these triggers are not my problem, but it really resonated with me with okay, why do I have these certain responses over responses, quite honestly, to my child's behaviors? What is that? What is happening in my own heart, what needs to be healed there so that I can be better connected as a person? And so learning to be a more connected parent has allowed me to recognize in my life where that has been a struggle for me in general, so maybe where I have been more dismissive or I have been more avoidant of relationship.
Speaker 2:I find myself in the afternoons, which are some like the busiest moments of a mother's day. Right, you pick all the kids up from school and you get home and like there's homework and there's dinner prep and there's all of these things. And I used to be the mom. I'm so much often focused on achieving and accomplishing and those types of things that those afternoons would look super busy and super stressful and can often be tense and in that I would miss connection opportunities with my children. And so I started just to sit on the couch in the afternoons just to make myself available.
Speaker 2:Yep, so the journey has really taught me where I was really holding back and withholding because of parts of me that needed to heal.
Speaker 2:And as those have healed, I've even been able to go back to my biological children and say I'm really sorry I handled this thing like this, because now that I understand relationship a little different, parenting a little different, I wish I'd handled that differently. And so I do believe it's made an impact on the types of relationships I get to have with my teenagers. I mean, we're going to face big obstacles, I feel certain as we continue to move forward through adolescence, right, but I know I have some connections now that without God own heart and also making my aptitude small so that I could accept his plan and that gospel centered approach, we would have a much different look in our home right now. And so I'm really thankful for that, for that piece that he has, you know, surprisingly been able to draw me closer to him even in the most stressful seasons of our lives, so that he could heal parts of me, so that I could watch the healing happen, you know, in our family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really is beautiful. Well, april, tell us what you do now with all of this knowledge, how you help families and stuff, and where we can find you Sure.
Speaker 2:So I have gone from always knowing, since I was five years old, that I was going to be a teacher. I used to be an educator and then became a mama and have had many you know side roads on this journey but have landed in the last few years as an adoption professional. I work in South Carolina with adoptive and pre-adoptive families. Our organization I work for a nonprofit called Flourishing Families. We have the opportunity to work alongside families who have adopted through DSS. Most of our staff has lived experience so it makes it really unique in how we get to link arms. Quite honestly, I get to be the person I needed nine years ago, like it's the biggest blessing that I never even could have imagined was going to come to fruition. I literally get to be the person I wish I had at that time, and so it's such a joy and it's so humbling and I wake up grateful all the time. In the meantime I'm also working on I'm an aspiring writer.
Speaker 2:So I am working on two projects. One is a book that's not quite a devotional and not quite a Bible study Kind of the thing I needed. When I told you you know the Bible felt like it would be too heavy to pick up. I'm kind of writing the book I wish I had had in that moment for the encouragements that I needed for my heart, and so I'm in the process of finishing that up and then hopefully moving toward a more you know, nonfiction, bringing together all that I've learned about parenting in the adoption world and what I wish I'd known from day one, kind of compiling that. So in that process.
Speaker 2:Right now you can find me on Instagram most easily. I'm at April underscoreil, underscore, ficklin um on instagram and I am growing from scratch a brand new instagram page because I'm also really careful to protect my family and my children and so I want to be able to give back to other parents and mamas while also protecting, and so I would love to see that grow so that I can continue to share tips, share encouragement and come alongside especially moms, give them a little hope in the overwhelm that we experience.
Speaker 1:Well, awesome. I love all the insight that you've given everybody today, and I watch your Instagram on a regular basis and you always provide such good tips and tools for parents, so I will put all of those links in the show notes for you to be able to check April out. April provides some great resources in this episode and I've linked those things in the show notes. As many of you know, I am super passionate about being trauma-informed and the need for parents to include their own self-care as a part of being truly trauma-informed. I have a five-day challenge that starts on Monday, april 14th, where you can start to learn some of these real self-care strategies. We're not going to be talking bubble baths or anything like that. We're going to be digging into how do you really care for your bodies so that you can show up as the calm, regulated parent that you need to be. If you need a little more guidance than five days, I do have a six-week program that begins on April 21st. If you message me on Instagram my Instagram is at Nicole T Barlow I can give you a discount code for the six-week course if you message me. This week we have been called to do really hard things, you guys, let's do everything that we can to be the best that we can for our kids and our families. If you've enjoyed this episode, send it to a friend that needs it April shares so much wisdom and be sure to subscribe and leave a review so that more parents can find the support that they need. Now let me pray for us as we close.
Speaker 1:Father God, we come before you today with open hearts. We really have some deep needs in our community. Lord, thank you for this call that you've placed on our lives. Thank you for the call that you've placed on all the lives of foster and adoptive parents. This is a sacred task of loving children who carry heavy stories. Lord, it is holy work, but it is also really, really hard.
Speaker 1:Lord, you see every wound that we carry. You see old hurts and unspoken fears. You see that buried grief. You know the parts of our hearts that feel stretched too thin or where we're not enough. Would you begin a fresh healing work in us? Gently reveal the places within that need with your touch, shine your light into the corners that we've tucked away for so long.
Speaker 1:Lord, we've forgotten that some of those old hurts are even there, but they show up in moments with our kids, god, help us not to run from the work that you're calling us to do in us, but meet us there, meet us in that place. Help us to look to you in those moments, to trust that you're not asking for perfection, you're only asking for our surrender. Father, let the healing in us become the healing in our homes. May our own restoration be a testimony of your goodness to the children in our care and in every moment when we feel like we're not enough, remind us that you are, that we don't have to be. We love you, jesus. We trust you In Jesus' name, amen.