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.
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Foster Parent Well
Understanding FASD in Foster Care & Adoption with Sandra Flach
Sandra Flach shares her family's journey with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and provides essential knowledge for foster and adoptive parents raising children with prenatal alcohol exposure.
• FASD affects 1 in 20 children in the United States—more prevalent than autism
• Only 10% of children with FASD display the facial features needed for diagnosis
• Prenatal alcohol exposure permanently alters brain structure and function
• There is no safe amount of alcohol during pregnancy and no safe time to drink
• Symptoms often intensify during teenage years as executive function demands increase
• Children with FASD may be chronologically one age but developmentally much younger
• Brain-based parenting focuses on understanding behaviors as brain differences
• Breaking tasks into smaller steps and creating routines helps children succeed
• Helping children understand their diagnosis empowers them to self-advocate
• The Justice for Orphans website and "Hope for the FASD Journey" support group provide resources
If this episode encouraged you, please share it with someone who may need it and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.
The Link to Sandra's website is JusticeForOrphansNY.org
You can find her at:
Instagram: @afc_journey and @sandraflach_jfo
Facebook: @the Adoption & Foster Care Journey and @Sandra Flach
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 foster parent well, so let's jump in. Hey friends, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1:It is just past Labor Day and let me tell you it is back to school and it came in hot this year. If your house has been anything like mine, you know the chaos is real New schools, new routines and basically trying to survive the emotional Olympics that comes with all of it. Y'all. Our house has been a mess, so I haven't posted a podcast in a few weeks because, well, I mean, that's just where we are. I'm sure you guys get it, but we are back. I am breathing. The people in my household are breathing. Well, mostly we're breathing and we're ready to dive in.
Speaker 1:Today we are kicking off FASD Awareness Month with an incredible guest, sandra Flack. She is a mom of eight children five through adoption, one kinship and four international. Her youngest two are teens diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. With over 30 years of parenting experience and 20 plus years as an adoptive parent, she truly understands the difficult road of parenting children, with trauma histories, y'all, and she is still in the trenches with us.
Speaker 1:If you haven't heard of FASD or fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, you are not alone. It's one of the most underdiagnosed and misunderstood brain-based disabilities out there, and yet it's way more common than people think. And here's the deal. If you're parenting kids from hard places, especially in foster care or adoption, fasd should absolutely be on your radar. It affects behavior, learning, relationships and how our kids experience the world, and if we don't understand it, we can't respond with the connection and support our kids so desperately need. So whether you know FASD is a part of your family story or you're just beginning to wonder if it might be, this episode is absolutely for you. Sandra brings the truth, the science and the heart, so let's get into it. All right, welcome to the show, sandra. I'm so excited to have you on. Introduce yourself. Tell our audience a little bit about you, about what you do and how you got here.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness. So I'm Sandra Flack. First and foremost, I'm an adoptive mom. My husband and I have eight children, five through adoption, one came as a kinship Confession. We never had it on our plan to become an adoptive or foster parent or any of that, although we firmly believe in James 1.27. So when we had the opportunity to open our home to a relative who needed a place to go that was safe, we did that, and then the Lord really just opened our hearts and or maybe I should say broke our hearts, you know, for the least of these.
Speaker 2:And then we pursued, several years later, international adoption where we ultimately brought home a sibling group of four children from Ukraine, and that really started our adventure. That opened the door for founding our nonprofit Justice for Orphans, starting our podcast, which was at one time a radio show on a Christian talk radio station that was local. And then, as our journey continued and I ended up, you know our children got diagnosed. Our youngest two got diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome. That set us on a lifelong journey of really learning and trying to support them and learn everything we could. And the more I learned, the more I recognized how prevalent FASD is among the foster adoption kinship population and how every parent needs to understand this. So we started offering training. I started speaking more and more on it and my heart is just really to support and encourage and equip, foster and adoptive parents, especially moms.
Speaker 1:I know your resources have been, and all of your trainings and the podcasts that you do have been so helpful for me in kind of researching some things in our journey, but how did you get to an FASD diagnosis? So, first of all, what is FASD? Because you mentioned that your kids were diagnosed with FASD. What is that and how did you get to that diagnosis?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question and it's a loaded one. So for everybody to know that FASD is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and it is actually in and of itself it's not a diagnosis, but it's the umbrella. Under FASD are the diagnosis such as fetal alcohol syndrome, the most severe end of the spectrum which my two boys are diagnosed with. But there's also ARND alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder, partial fetal alcohol syndrome, and then NDPAE, which I think, if I remember, is like neurodevelopmental partial alcohol effect. I don't know, I can't remember all of them, but they're all under there.
Speaker 2:And so my boys got diagnosed. We didn't know anything about anything when we started this adoption process, our kinship placement. When she came in, because she came to us, she didn't go into foster care, so we didn't even have the advantage of having taken the foster care training classes that parents have to take. So we didn't know about trauma. We didn't know anything about anything and we didn't even know we should know anything about anything. That's how bad it was back in 1999. But then we adopted, fast forward to our international, our kids who came in from Ukraine, and by that time I knew enough to read a book about attachment. And then somebody said you should learn something about fetal alcohol syndrome because it's common in kids adopted from Eastern Europe. So I'm like okay. So I did a little research online about that and it was scary and dark and I was like, oh yeah, well, we're not going to, that's not going to happen to us.
Speaker 2:And you know, miraculously enough, our first three kids came home from Ukraine and we were sort of lulled into thinking we were good at this. And we were sort of lulled into thinking we were good at this and we knew what we were doing. There was a lot of craziness, but not major big behaviors that made it hard. And then we traveled for the youngest sibling a few years later and the second. We met him in the orphanage. We were like, yeah, we are not equipped to bring this five-year-old home. This is harder than bringing home the three other ones at the same time and I highly suspect that there's that fetal alcohol thing going on here. So we ended up after we did get home.
Speaker 2:We were home about a year and we sought diagnosis. So actually, so the youngest one, so the youngest two of our Ukrainian kids they were six and eight at the time they both got diagnosed by a developmental pediatrician with fetal alcohol syndrome and they got diagnosed pretty easily because I believe they had the facial features, which is there's classic facial features. If the facial features are present, you'll get a diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome. Unfortunately, doctors rely on the facial features in order to diagnose most of the time and only about 10% of kids with FASD actually have the facial features. So there's about 90% of the kids out there who aren't getting diagnosed because doctors are relying still on those facial features. Also, because we were an international adoption, we did have translated court documents from Ukraine that listed the parents as alcoholics. So that helped and also because it was an international adoption, I believe there was no birth mom to shame, so this doctor felt pretty comfortable giving this diagnosis.
Speaker 2:I find in the States it's really hard to get a diagnosis because doctors don't like to shame birth moms. Not only are they looking for facial features, they're also looking for maternal admission of alcohol consumption during pregnancy and with foster and adoption. We don't often have that information. We might know there was drug use and if there was drug use it is highly likely there was alcohol and alcohol is more harmful than the drugs. Even so, it's hard to get a diagnosis. We were able to get one. They also got diagnosed with ADHD and pretty much what happened. The doctor gave us a pamphlet on ADHD much what happened. The doctor gave us a pamphlet on ADHD, the diagnosis of FAS and ADHD, and said have a nice day there was like nothing offered after that.
Speaker 1:So it was like, yeah, still no help there. Yeah, that that is hard. And because I feel like I mean even recently, I know in our area when we went through training 13 years ago, it wasn't part of our training to go through foster care or whatever. Now in our state they have just switched over the training and in doing training there is a section on substance use in utero and we do focus mainly on alcohol because of the effects of alcohol. But I didn't get that information coming through and still, even though it's in that information that we train in the beginning, I find that there's just not a whole lot of information on what it actually looks like. What it actually looks like. So when you went to pick up your fourth, the fourth child in the sibling group, what was it that made you say, hey, this is different and we may need to look at FAS?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he was out of control. He was five years old and honestly, there obviously was the trauma piece because he had been in the orphanage since a newborn till the age of five. So there was definitely trauma. And the thing with FASD is the primary symptoms of FASD very much overlap with the same symptoms of trauma, overlap with the same symptoms of trauma. And so sometimes parents and this was me too like, is this from the trauma, is this from the alcohol? And probably the answer is yes, it's from both, because they're very much the same symptoms.
Speaker 2:But if you do have both trauma and prenatal exposure to alcohol, the symptoms, the behaviors, are compounded. It's harder, like next level hard. So we just saw this little kid who was like a wild animal and very impulsive, didn't have good communication skills, didn't have good language, couldn't really communicate very well even in his own language, just out of control, and he was tiny. There was just those things. And then, once we did get him home, it was like we couldn't keep him off the top of the refrigerator. He was just very impulsive, had no concept of right or wrong, or we said no, not to do this, and he would just go do this and would just rock. You know, there was a lot of rocking, there was a lot of rhythmic stuff, there was a lot of sensory stuff, so all of these things. So we sought a counselor who specializes in adoption and I brought it up to her and she said I agree that it's probably fetal alcohol syndrome and she recommended us pursuing that diagnosis with the developmental pediatrician.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. Plus you mentioned that he had the facial features of fetal alcohol. So there are some very distinguished facial features that come with some forms of that diagnosis, but that's not always true. So why does it affect kids, sometimes with facial features and sometimes it doesn't?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what happens is, in order for the facial features to be affected, alcohol would have to have been consumed during the pregnancy, on days 15 through 18 of gestation, so when the face is being formed in utero, if alcohol is introduced, alcohol isn't filtered out, it crosses the placental barrier. I've heard another trainer say the phrase if mom drinks, baby drinks, so it's toxic, it's a teratogen, it alters cells, it kills cells and so on, just those very few days during the pregnancy. If mom drinks, then the face is affected and those classic features will present. Mom could be drinking all the other days, but not those days. And then there's still alcohol exposure and the brain is affected, but the face won't be.
Speaker 1:Well, days, 15 through 18, I mean they probably don't even know that they're pregnant, right, yeah, I mean I wonder how much that comes into play and in a lot of situations, not because the mom is an alcoholic or has a drinking problem, but just because they're even a casual drinker that doesn't know that they're pregnant yet have been prenatally exposed.
Speaker 2:That is higher than autism, which I believe the number for autism is one in 35. And it is because most people drink and you know this doesn't just affect alcoholic drug addict moms. Right, this is. You know, a lot of women drink and unless you're planning a pregnancy and watching the calendar and you're avoiding alcohol, you could be drinking alcohol. The calendar and you're avoiding alcohol, you could be drinking alcohol just casually, a glass of wine every weekend. And if you're pregnant it can affect the development of the baby because there's no known safe amount of alcohol, there's no known safe time in a pregnancy and there's no safe type of alcohol. So it's like Russian roulette. You really don't want to take that chance because there's so many different variables to the impact that the alcohol could have.
Speaker 2:Our daughter who came in through kinship, her mom had died of cancer. Her mom had a career, she was in her 30s, she was single and she was not an alcoholic. But she also had another health condition and was told she could never conceive. So she was about 10, 12 weeks into her pregnancy when she suddenly realized, much to her joy, that she was pregnant, because she didn't think she could ever have children. But even during those first, say, 10 weeks she was just drinking. Maybe she went out every Friday night with girlfriends after work and had a couple glasses of wine. That is all it takes, because fast forward everything that I now know as primary symptoms of FASD. Our daughter, who came in as kinship, has all of those symptoms and she's now 35. And there's still things right that it's still obvious.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean I could see how that could come into play pretty regularly. And I mean I have heard a shift in the rhetoric around what is safe to consume when you're pregnant and there are doctors that are saying now, hey, it's okay to have a glass of wine every now and then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of my daughters is expecting her first baby and she was upset because she was told she couldn't have sushi, because she loves sushi and you can't have raw fish. And I said, did they say anything about alcohol? And she was like no, I don't think they did and I'm like don't drink anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean, when you have seen the effects, it's like I think sometimes people downplay trauma too with the kind of rhetoric that kids are resilient, that they're going to overcome, that it is what it is right. But when you see it up close, when you understand the back ends of what has happened and how it affects kids, you're like you understand the magnitude of the impact that trauma actually has on a child's life. I think it's the same, don't you, that when you see the effects of how it changes a child's life if they have been exposed in utero, I would think that it completely changes your perspective on alcohol, even socially.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, for sure. And FASD is a lifelong physical disability that affects the brain and the body of people who were exposed in utero and it alters brain cells, it kills brain cells and it literally changes the function and structure of the brain. And while progress can be made and we know, we hear a lot in the trauma community about neuroplasticity right, the brain is plastic. So, yes, new neural pathways can be formed and that kind of thing. But so far the research is indicating that maybe the FASD brain is not as plastic because alcohol was introduced, because the harm that has come. The brain is formed from bottom to top and as alcohol is introduced it kills and alters cells. So if you think about those neural pathways, it's like they're broken, they're destroyed and by the time you get to the top of the brain the prefrontal cortex, executive function, all of those things everything is off kilter. So there's just so much that you're going to gain. So that's why these individuals, our kids, need so much in the way of support and services, possibly lifelong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can see that it feels a lot more like a traumatic brain injury yes, very much so Than emotional trauma, because we do talk a lot on this podcast about how kids can heal from trauma, how to help support healing and all of those things. But I that my research. I have seen the same things where the, the there are limitations to what that looks like with fetal alcohol.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean our kids can become very successful, they can learn lots of things, but it is really an invisible disability because most kids, unless they have the facial features and I find the average person doesn't even see the facial features we can recognize somebody with Down syndrome, but you're not so quickly going to recognize somebody with FAS, even if they have the facial features. The symptoms are behavioral, so it looks like defiance and disobedience and rebellion and all of that when really it's not that they're giving us a hard time or choosing to do those things. They're having a hard time. They really can't function and meet the expectations that we have on them because their brain works differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you talked about you know, in your youngest you noticed right away that there were differences. But I have seen, and one of the things we're starting to research in one of our kids is that sometimes some of those symptoms don't really start to show until they enter the teenage years or young adulthood because of the changes that are taking place in the brain and the things that are required of kids or young adults, you know, in that age range. So can you explain that a little bit about why that is?
Speaker 2:Exactly. You hit the nail on the head because that's what happened to us. We got the diagnosis but there really wasn't anything out there. And when I did get home after the diagnosis and then I opened the computer again and did a little research back then this going several years back the only thing I found about FAS was if your kid has a diagnosis of that, they're facing a future of addiction, homelessness, incarceration, high rates of suicide. So I was like I think I'll just shut the computer off and I'm not going to look at that anymore. But what we had found at the time was I had a copy of the Connected Child by Dr Purvis and we dove into Empower to Connect and the Connected Child and all the TBRI stuff and applied all of those things and they helped us.
Speaker 2:We got connection, attachment, made great gains with our two youngest plus our other kids as we began to understand the impacts of trauma.
Speaker 2:But then they became teenagers and it was like what is going on here, because we do have connection and attachment, like why are all these crazy things happening?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, when different ages and different stages and, of course, as you know, when teenagers were starting to get the hormones, are kicking in all of that, the chemistry changes and it becomes more obvious also because as they become involved in, like middle school, high school expectations are set on the kids that they really can't meet it.
Speaker 2:There begins to become this wider gap between where our kids are and where their neurotypical peers are and they kind of get left behind and it becomes very challenging and parents begin to struggle and we see these things as behaviors and we are trying to fix the behaviors without really understanding there's really a brain-based condition going on here behind the behaviors and we need to support our kids. So when my boys began to go off the tracks, that's when I began to really dive in and pursue and learn everything I could about FASD and thankfully by then there was a little more out there and the more I was able to learn and get professional training to help my kids, the more I was like. Every adoptive and foster parent needs to know this because it affects probably 80% of kids in foster and adoptive placements. That's a lot and most are not diagnosed and parents don't know.
Speaker 1:Sure, absolutely Well, we didn't really look at that as a diagnosis for any of our kids. Our kids came to us nine years ago and there was one child that has some more severe diagnoses and they had mentioned probably some sort of exposure, but most likely more drug exposure. But we hadn't looked at that for our other children. But now that my kids are entering some of my kids are entering adulthood, we see a really big gap in what they are able to do and what their peers are able to do. And I know when we train foster parents now that I train this section, this module on exposure in utero we talk about how kids can regurgitate information often, but that when they're required to think, when they're required to problem solve, when they're required to use more of that executive function part of their brain, that critical thinking part of their brain, then that's when they struggle. So can you tell us why that happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as they get older, you mean.
Speaker 1:Yes, as they get older. I mean because when they're younger their days are kind of laid out. I mean our kids don't have to do a lot of thinking about the structure of their day and their schedule and all of their things, and even in school a lot of it is one plus one is two. Just remembering one plus one is two and there may be some memory issues that we have seen in the past. But when they get to an age where it's like, okay, well, now you have to take this information and think through it and kind of form your own opinion, they struggle doing that sort of task. And as a teenager entering adulthood and thinking about life on their own and planning for their future and putting things in place that are moving them towards that future in place that are moving them towards that future, we've seen a really big gap in what they are able to do on their own without constant instruction and laying it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and a lot of that that you listed is really executive function, which is highly impacted by alcohol exposure. So planning, organizing, linking cause and effect this is one of the reasons why consequences don't really work with our kids with FASD, because their brain can't make that link between oh, I did this thing and now I'm suffering the consequences, I'm in school, suspension, or I've had my cell phone taken away or whatever. It is partly because of short-term memory challenges. They're already moved on. Their brain has moved on to the next thing, so they haven't really retained the incident that caused them to get the consequence. And then you have to be able to link okay, so I did this thing. Here's my consequence. I don't like this consequence, so therefore I'm not going to do that behavior again. There's a disconnect. They don't link those things together, so they have a really hard time learning from consequences. And then the planning, the organizing, impulse control is also controlled. Our impulses are controlled by executive function. So when there's poor executive function, there's poor impulse control. Decision making is also part of that and things like language, like you mentioned, they can repeat or regurgitate, but then there's no execution of the information because they don't really understand it. They might be able to repeat it, that doesn't mean they understand it or they look like they understand what we're talking about and then they can be agreeing with us.
Speaker 2:I just I had a few years ago, a big conversation with my teenage son, 15 years old. It's very important for 15 year old boys to understand boundaries right, good boundaries, good words. And you know good behavior. You know appropriate boundaries, appropriate words, and we were. I was having this great conversation with him about appropriate words, appropriate boundaries, appropriate words, and we were. I was having this great conversation with him about appropriate words, appropriate boundaries. It appeared like he was tracking with me. We were having a great conversation. He was yep, yeah, you're right, yeah, yeah. And just something made me ask at the end of the conversation do you know what appropriate means? And he was like, no, what does that mean? And I could have left that conversation thinking we are all good here and he just he, you know, he didn't know what that was. So we simplified it down to this very simple script of good words, good boundaries, you know practice. What that was reminded him all the time and every time he goes anywhere church, when he was going to school out in the community. Now he has a part-time job, he goes to work Good words, good boundaries Because he could understand that and he can remember that.
Speaker 2:But he had a hard time with appropriate. And then a few years later, he was getting ready to go somewhere and it was a very warm spring day and he was trying to put on winter boots. He just wanted to stuff his feet in the boots and go and I'm like no, wear your sneakers. It's going to be like 75 today. No, I'm going to wear these boots. No, wear your sneakers. He's like no, I'm just going to wear these. And I was like those are not appropriate. And he said I didn't say anything wrong because in his mind he'd learned appropriate had to do with words. He couldn't then bring that over to apply to things like clothing or maybe television or music or whatever right. So they have a hard time with language and communication as well and they also tend to be very concrete, literal thinkers. So as our kids get older and things like money, understanding and managing money and time, as our kids get older and things like money, understanding and managing money and time, as our kids get older and they're having to do that, they also have a hard time managing those things.
Speaker 2:One of my boys had, when he started working, had all of this money. He would cash these paychecks and put the money in his wallet. And we were like you need a bank account because you can't carry all this cash around with you. And he said no, the bank just takes your money. And we were like, yeah, it does, but it keeps it safe. But see to him if he couldn't see it? He didn't have it so he couldn't trust that the bank would have it and he ended up losing a bunch of his money. His wallet got lost. So then we insisted on the bank account and we were able to show him. Now you have this bank app. You can see your money on your phone. It is in there. You have this debit card. You can access it. But it was examples like that.
Speaker 2:As our kids get older, things like car insurance is very nebulous, right? What is car insurance exactly? Because we had one of our kids get in big trouble not paying their car insurance, because that's very abstract and they have a hard time understanding it. So, especially as they get into middle school, high school and beyond, that's when you really begin to see the challenges individuals who are prenatally exposed face, because they have a hard time managing time, those things and I didn't mention.
Speaker 2:I want to mention slow processing pace, because that's a huge one for our kids and that's where they have a hard time catching everything that's spoken to them. So you know, they might sometimes we say they catch every third word or maybe they only catch something at the very end that was said. So if you give them a long list of things to do, they'll most likely only do the last thing that was said. So if you give them a long list of things to do, they'll most likely only do the last thing that was said because they didn't catch it all. So it really becomes a challenge when kids are in school and the teacher calls on them and they're supposed to respond with an answer instantly and they can't, and then the teacher assumes they're not paying attention or they were fooling around or they don't care or whatever. But they have a hard time responding in the moment. They need extra time, they need less words spoken to them and they need, you know, we need to keep it more simplified sometimes and slow it down.
Speaker 1:Oh, all of that is just such good information and I think you gave some really good tips. But how do you parent differently? Right, if you suspect FAS, fasd you have a diagnosis or not, but you suspect it how do you parent differently than you would parent, saying, using TBRI or the connected child or something like that? Like what are the differences that you would do from traditional trauma parenting?
Speaker 2:So I think that TBRI, the traditional trauma parenting, lays a perfect foundation for this because they marry so well together With FASD. We've learned to take a brain-based approach which really TBRI takes into consideration trauma-impacted brain development and then that's going to impact behavior. So we need to take the history into consideration, right. So with our kids who were exposed to alcohol in utero, their brain has been also affected. So we need to take that into consideration as well. So the big question I train parents to look for, or to always ask, is what does my child's brain have to do with this behavior? Right, when it comes to any expectation, can their brain do this? So you know, a big part of prenatal exposure is also we used to call it dismaturity. The language is now kind of leaning more towards developmental timeline. So a lot of times our kids are younger cognitively, developmentally, socially right than their neurotypical peers. You can see it with trauma and it's also very common in kids with FASD. So, taking into consideration, if I have a 12-year-old and I want them to go clean their room and I say, go clean your room, if developmentally we find them to really be more like six, we're going to need to set our expectation on cleaning that room, at what a six-year-old can do, because that's where they are. Can they gain steps and grow and get better? Yes, over time maybe, but we have to meet them where they're at. So with any expectation we always have to figure out our best guess. Where are they developmentally, cognitively? Is this even a reasonable expectation? So, because if you have a five-year-old who's having a hard time in kindergarten and they can't sit still and they're not following directions and they have a hard time sharing and you know the school's calling every day and everything's just disastrous and the child doesn't even want to go and they're crying all the time, if they've been prenatally exposed and we can figure out, you know, really they're more like two adults. We don't put two-year-olds in kindergarten all day and expect them to sit still, so possibly they're just not ready for kindergarten. So we have to always look at the expectation. Can their brain match that right? Is their brain able to even do that? What are the things?
Speaker 2:So I always, when I work with families and when I teach this, I go through all the primary symptoms of FASD and when you know them and then you're having a hard time, your child's having a hard time with something and then we look at okay, so what primary symptom comes into play here? Right? So if you're expecting a child to do something that they really can't do, how can we help them to be able to do that? What accommodations could come into play? And the way we've done it is knowing, like, for example, our son. You know we have a lot of land that, a lot of lawn mowing that needs to be done in the summertime. You know we have a teenage son and you know you would think any teenage son would love to get on a riding zero turn lawnmower and spend their day making. You know we are paying, like we'll pay you to do this, and he just was so overwhelmed and would flat out refuse. And then the more I learned about this, about FASD and understanding you know what? We have a huge yard. It's overwhelming. He doesn't really know where to start. He doesn't know where to go next, he doesn't know when he's done, he doesn't have a good grasp on time.
Speaker 2:So he'll be out there for 15 minutes and think he's been out there for two hours and come in like fried and done. So if you don't understand what you're looking at, it looks like we have a lazy teenager who just doesn't want to work. But when we factored in, well, you know what. He also has sensory issues, so he would benefit from some noise canceling headphones while mowing. He needs a timer, so he knows okay, at least stay out there for 30 minutes. And then dad started going out with him, because our son also needs a lot of and not everybody with an FASD has this, but our son, our youngest son, is so impacted that he really requires one-on-one guidance for most tasks. He can feed himself and dress himself and things like that.
Speaker 2:However, to stay on task and complete a task and know what to do and follow the steps, he needs support and guidance. So my husband will go out with him and my husband will either be also mowing or he'll use the weed whacker. But he'll tell my son okay, just do this section here from here to here. And then when he's done with that, my husband will say okay, now do this section. So we've sectioned it off. And then he's made a routine out of. These are the order we do the sections in each week. So it becomes very routine and just taking all of those things into consideration and understanding, we just can't say go mow the lawn.
Speaker 2:That's a huge, overwhelming task, but breaking it down into smaller steps and taking into consideration his symptoms and how we can support each one of those, he can learn to mow the lawn and he can do a pretty good job at it, although then there's very odd things, nicole, like the one day he was supposed to be mowing the lawn. He was literally driving the mower up and down the driveway for like an hour. I thought he was out there mowing the lawn. No, he's driving up and down the paved driveway, not mowing anything, but was out there for an hour and I'm like, could you have at least drive on the grass and cut it, so there, so there's like no rhyme or reason, but that's where, like, his brain had him just going up and down the driveway and it's like okay. So sometimes it's just like that's the FASD brain yeah, yeah, gosh.
Speaker 1:Well, how much do your kids know about their diagnosis and how do you balance, like sharing with them their limitations and still encouraging them to be at their best?
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are great questions Because when I didn't know in the early days of this, we didn't talk about it so much. But as I began to learn, then I began to talk about the brain more and more at home and made it very normal to talk about the brain and how everybody's brains work differently. And because I know my boys have memory challenges, I make sure that when I've done something where I forgot, I went to the store, I got this list of stuff and, oh my gosh, I completely forgot to get milk, like it was on my list, and I walked out without it. I can point out to them mom forgot. Everybody forgets things sometimes so that they don't feel so, because they face so many challenges every day. They feel like failures all the time and that's we start seeing secondary symptoms which include things like depression, aggression, frustration, symptoms which include things like depression, aggression, frustration. There's a whole list of things because their brain has to work so much harder to do what the average person can do. It's frustrating and exhausting. So I try to normalize talking about the brain and talking about the symptoms, and so my younger son, who's now 19, he understands because he'll sometimes say oh, brain, think he knows he has a hard time. We talk about FASD all the time. He'll sometimes say you don't know how hard FASD is and I'm like tell me, tell me what's hard, tell me why you have a hard time being in school. Right, there's too many people. He'll tell me it's too loud, there's too much talking, there's fire drills, like all those things overwhelmed him. So he had a very modified school day when he was in school. So we've normalized it with him.
Speaker 2:But then my next older son he does not want to have a disability, he does not want to be identified as that, did not want to even really talk about it. So the way we do it with him is with. But he knows he's got certain challenges and they had IEPs in school. And my son who's now he'll be 22 soon he works but he has a job with our family business. So he gets accommodations, although I don't think he realizes he gets accommodations because, it's understood, he does drive. My younger son may never drive, but this son does drive.
Speaker 2:However, he was having a really hard time one day at work and he got in trouble because he was told to do one thing which was, I think, change a tire. He was in the middle of that and then all of a sudden an employer is, his older brother said I need you to go do this right now, you need to go pick up these parts right now. And my and so the son with the, with the FASD, was like I'm send, you know, send the other guy, I'm doing this, right? Well, you're not supposed to tell the boss what to do. But so there was this little kerfuffle at work and then afterwards I heard about it later that night and I said so why was that hard? And because I already knew, you know, kids with FASD have a really hard time transitioning from one task to the next. They also get hyper-focused. We call it perseveration. They get hyper-focused on what they're doing, so it's hard for them to move to the next thing. So he was told to do the tire, to change the tire. So he was all in, focused on that. So he had a really hard time stopping in the middle of that task, transitioning to the next thing. You told me to do this. This is a very literal, concrete thing. So his brain has a hard time doing that. So then, having the conversation with him, so, yeah, it's hard for you to change gears so fast, right? And he was like, yeah, I don't like doing that. And I said, well, that is a part of how your brain works. Because of the FASD, next time maybe tell your boss. Can I finish this first? Try to have that conversation. I have a hard time switching gears. And we've made sure that his employer, even though it's a family employer, understands the symptoms of FASD. I've given documentation just so that they can take that into consideration.
Speaker 2:He's also a volunteer firefighter, this son. However, because of his size and because of other health conditions, he can't do interior firefighting. But he took an exterior firefighting course and had accommodations for that because he had had an IEP. He is another one that has slow processing pace. He also requires things to be read to him, so he's very hands-on and thrives in that area. So most of the course was hands-on, except for at the end of each module there was a multiple choice test and so he had accommodations. The test questions would be read to him and he could give his answer verbally, and that worked out great for most of the course. But there was one module where the instructor was different and he read the test questions and he read them fast. So it was a test question, multiple choice answer options and then he'd be on to the next question and my son hadn't picked his answer yet and then he was like falling behind.
Speaker 2:But he advocated for himself because he came home very frustrated and I said you have a hard time catching verbal information. That's part of FASD. You can go back and ask for them to give you that test over and read the question slower next time. And he did, he advocated for himself, they allowed him to take it a second time and he passed it because they understood we have to just read it a little slower and give them a little more time to answer.
Speaker 2:So it's important that they understand their symptoms and they understand FASD, if they have it, so that they can advocate for themselves when they get older. So it just depends on the kid and their age. I find the younger the kids are, the more we can normalize. Talking about the brain, everybody's brain works differently, everybody has different strengths and everybody needs help in different ways. But talking about the brain how the brain works and then talking about it in the sense of symptoms, your brain works this way. You're going to need extra help with this. You're going to need this list to help you remember the steps. Things like that, I think, can help our kids learn about themselves and what help that they need, and to be able to advocate for themselves even as they get older.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I mean I love the equipping that you're doing with your kids and the empowering that you're doing that you're still explaining you know how their brain works. You're explaining some of the limitations or some of the struggles that they may have, but you're empowering them to advocate for themselves, to find a way to work with those things, to still be able to accomplish a task. So I mean I think that is really amazing. How do you this kind of goes hand in hand but especially as kids are moving into teenage and adulthood, how do you help them have their own voice, have their own opinion, make their own choices? But if they're developmentally less than teenager adult, mentally less than teenager adult, right, how do you balance letting them have their voice and stepping in when they need it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, every kid is different and FASD is a spectrum, right. Not every kid is going to present with every symptom and at different stages you may see different symptoms develop. And it's been challenging, especially as they get older. Our one son drives, the other one may not drive. And when he turned 16, people were asking him oh, because where we live, you can get a learner's permit to drive when you're 16. And people were asking him, much to my like. I was trying to like no, no, no, don't ask them that you know. And he would say to me oh, you're mean, you won't let me get a driver's license. And I said, well, okay, but first, in order to get a driver's license, you have to pass a written test. And he was like oh really, because he was like not wanting anything to do with it.
Speaker 2:And then I said the other thing is is like where would you go if you had a driver's license? And he was like, hmm, texas, now we live in New York, so he doesn't know anybody in Texas. And so it's like, yeah, I don't think you're quite ready for this driver's license thing yet. Because that's one of the scariest things is they can't necessarily make wise decisions about where to go. That's safe. Make wise decisions about where to go, that's safe. So when safety comes into play because this son can drive the lawnmower, he can ride a four-wheeler, he can drive a golf cart, he can drive things and do really well with that but when he's riding in the car with me going somewhere, he has a lot of anxiety about the car in front of us and the car coming up alongside of us. And so, first of all, I'm not even sure how he would do in traffic, but being able to make a safe choice about where to go. Our other son, who's the firefighter, who does drive he did in the very beginning we've discovered he went someplace that was not safe for him to go, so we had to have a big conversation about that and I think he over time got it. But being able to just have those conversations so that they're, you know, giving them voice. Like we know you want to be a volunteer firefighter. You know we support you in that. We know that you want to like right now that son wants to quit his actual job and repair golf carts. So we had to explain you know you're so good at doing hands-on things and repairing things and that's a great side hustle, but you can't quit your like everyday job. To do that there's not enough. You need health insurance, you need to be able to pay bills. You're not going to be able to do that, so this would be something you could do on the side, but you're not going to quit your day job. So you know he just thought well, I've, I've repaired two golf carts, I have a business now and it's like that's not really how this works. So coming alongside and try to teach and mentor and and and invite other people, like he's got an older brother who's a great mentor that helps him at work.
Speaker 2:But it is challenging because our kids and what kids do none of them like to be told what to do. But I find, especially with my youngest, he needs to be told what to do throughout the day with just basic daily tasks, like it's time to brush your teeth, it's time to go get dressed, you need to wear deodorant. And at 19, he'll say I don't like to brush my teeth. I'm like, well, but we brush our teeth every day before we leave the house, so he's more. That's where he requires more one-on-one and every kid is different, right? So he's requiring more. Kids with FASD can have anywhere from a low IQ to a very high IQ, so it can be anywhere. So one of mine has a low IQ, one has more of an average IQ. So it's just. Every kid is different. Knowing where they're at, understanding what supports they're going to need and giving them voice and teaching them about this so that they can advocate for themselves is really important going into the future.
Speaker 1:Sandra. All of that is just invaluable information for parents to have and to be able to research and to know that this is even a thing for the majority of us that we don't. We're not, most of us are not researching this and looking into it. So if parents want to learn more, if they want to find you, where can they?
Speaker 2:find you. Oh, thanks so much. So if you go to our website, which is justicefororphansnyorg, we have a whole section on our website dedicated to our foster and adoption resources, which my podcast is the Adoption and Foster Care Journey. So you can find the podcast on all the major platforms. We have social media also the Adoption and Foster Care Journey and at our Justice for Orphans website, there's a whole section dedicated to the adoption and foster care journey.
Speaker 2:Very, very soon anyway, it's going through some major overhauls. If you go to our website and just look at training or FASD resources, you'll find it all there, but in the updated website we have a whole section that's adoption and foster care journey, which includes the training that I do for foster and adoptive parents and professionals as well, as we have a support group called Hope for the FASD Journey. It's an online support group for parents of kiddos with FASD, whether they're diagnosed or not, and we have parents who have kids as young as five. Many of us have older kids. It is faith-based, we pray with each other, we encourage each other and that's a great way to stay connected and really find your tribe, because we know we need adoptive and foster parents, need each other and if, especially, you're parenting kids who've been prenatally exposed, it's next level crazy. So we like really need each other. So that's on there as well as the podcast, and you can also reach out to me through the website as well.
Speaker 1:And I will also say you guys, I'll put a link to this but Sandra has written a book that's kind of told her their journey through adoption and you guys, I read this book in like two and a half days. Like I will say, sandra, like my kids were not very happy with me reading this book because I stayed up all night and was super cranky the next day but I could not put it down. I mean, it was just so good the way that it's written and just, I think, learning about how other people get into this space and what their journey looks like I think is always so amazing. It's amazing to see other people that are walking the same path that we are, and you're so honest throughout the book. I think it's really refreshing.
Speaker 2:Oh well, thank you. So that book is my first book is Orphans no More A Journey Back to the Father. So that is our adoption story, as well as what I learned about our spiritual adoption as children of God through being an adoptive parent. And then I actually have another book coming out, probably late fall, and it is a devotional for foster and adoptive moms and it's called Soul Care Saturday 52 Devotions for Foster and Adoptive Moms. So stay tuned to my social media and our website for that, because that'll be released this fall.
Speaker 1:Awesome, I am super excited. Well, sandra, thank you so much for sharing with us today and being such a great resource for the foster and adoptive community.
Speaker 2:Oh, thanks so much, Nicole. I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1:What a great conversation. I'm so grateful for Sandra and the wisdom that she brought today. Fasd is big and complex and honestly it can feel very overwhelming. But knowledge is power. When we understand what's really going on in our kids' brains and bodies, we can trade frustration for compassion and reaction for connection. That's the work. If this episode stirred something in you, maybe gave you some clarity or maybe even brought up some grief for you, just know that you are not alone. I see you. You're doing hard work of showing up for your kids in ways the world may never fully understand, and that matters. If this episode encouraged you, would you share it with someone else who may need it? And, if you haven't already, go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming up next.
Speaker 1:We've got more powerful conversations in the lineup this month. Let me pray over us as we close. Father. Thank you for every parent listening right now. You know the weight they carry and the love they pour out, especially when it's not easy and when the path isn't clear. Give them supernatural strength and wisdom and peace. Help them see their child through your eyes and remind them that they are not alone, that you go before them, you are behind them and you are not alone, that you go before them, you are behind them and you are right beside them. Fill their homes with grace and patience and moments of joy, even in the chaos. We love you, lord. We trust you In Jesus' name, amen, thank you.