Stealing

On Fetuses (and Children) Who Steal

Yesterday, I was driving my 11-year-old son Raffi home from tutoring. 

The car is such a great place to learn about your kids. We talk. Mostly, I listen. Edie, for instance, plays music at full blast if she’s anxious. We listen to Ozzy Osbourne or Queen, whatever she is in the mood for, until she feels she can talk about whatever is on her mind. 

Man, we spend a lot of time in the car. 

Raffi, in the car, is non-stop chatter. He’s an extrovert. He doesn’t need the music. He wants to sort things out. This helps us work through his stuff. 

We emphasize 1) helping him be aware of his behaviors and impulses and 2) rewarding him for being honest. As I’ve described in other stories, this is important for him because the after effects of early life neglect and hunger have woven pathways into his brain and rejiggered everything. So now, he has an overwhelming need to “get things.” He needs to make sure he is cared for. This creates all kinds of demands about what he feels we should get and do for him. 

Right now!! 

Immediately!!

Everyone stop everything for me!!

What about me???

He perceives an empty hole inside himself. That’s his visualization and it’s an accurate one. A blackhole to fill with junk food or sugary drinks, or attention, or new stuff, or some kind of currency to fill in that hole that can never ever be filled. An Amazon package stirs up so much excitement that it almost feels like panic. He has to be the one to open the box! Sometimes for our boy, excitement and panic are the same.

It’s dopamine. Something new. Something sparkly. Something to jingle-jangle all the neural pathways. He obsesses and demands and rages to get his needs met. He is, sometimes, a toddler in an 11-year-old’s body. 

He will do what he needs to do to get those needs met. 

Yes, he will lie. 

And, yes, he will steal. 

This is not uncommon for kids with early neglect and hunger. And kids in the system often-enough end up with unprepared adoptive parents who think they are getting a typical kid, maybe with a few adjustment issues, and then they are bowled over by the depth of the disorder.  

These adoptive parents are also unprepared for what the stealing and lying may signify – the ways their child is trying to break the attachment between them. Often, the kids are successful. They can create chaos in families, marriages and communities.

Stealing and lying appear so much more frequently in adopted kids with attachment disorders that psychologists believe there’s a strong connection. John Bowlby, the well-known attachment theorist and researcher, believed these kids feel an overwhelming compulsion to both 1) satiate the hole they feel inside and 2) destroy their relationships to their caregivers.

Stealing and lying are the perfect tools to kill your relationships. 

It’s brilliant, actually. 

Most of us see stealing and lying as a moral compass issue. If you have been raised right, you don’t steal. If you are a good person, you don’t lie (unless it's a “white lie” to save someone’s feelings or be polite.)  

Lying derides attachment. It disarms healthy people, so that they have no foundation to deal with you. The lying can be so compulsive and disrupting to the families of these kids that the parents experience severe blocked care. They may stop providing care and affection for the child altogether, which just messages the child that they were right all along - they do not deserve love. They cannot trust anyone to care for them. 

The adoptive parents attempt to fix the problem by punishing the child, doling out consequences, removing preferred things and privileges, stripping their rooms down to their mattresses to teach them a lesson. This backfires. It sends a message to the child that they are right not to trust. That’s when behaviors and distrust escalate even further. The next steps are residential treatment facilities, wilderness programs, psych wards and juvie. It’s grim as fuck.

These kids need relationships and connection so much, they ache for it, it consumes them. But they do all the things that drive people away. 

That is the schism of attachment. 

Raffi and David and I are often very frank about the ways in which he tries to push us away. And it takes lots of date nights and late night talks and therapy and pep talks and alone time, and me cooking with my cookbook club sisters, and David mountain biking, and time out with the other siblings so they get a break, and all the times where I’m hiding in a locked car with the windows up and the air conditioning on, just to stay grounded and sane when he has all his weapons going. 

Raffi has two kinds of lies: 1) getting out of trouble (this is most kids) and 2)  the confabulated ones, where he creates a story in his head to suit his needs and then, once downloaded, becomes an unshakeable truth. 

“I remember when I was a kid…” and then he will tell me a whole thread of narrative that couldn’t possibly be true. And yet, the lie sticks. He holds it forever. I’m sure he doesn’t know he does it.

Some adoptive parents of children of neglect have been falsely accused of beating their kid, abusing them, starving them. They spend years managing CPS investigations and worry about losing their other kids. 

These kids do these kinds of anti-social things, not because their humanity has been removed, but because they are so fragile they can't risk the potential of losing more people. The challenge: It’s super hard to remember a kid is fragile and needy, when they are lying, manipulating, stealing and raging. 

Their behavior and reasoning make no sense in an attached world. 

+++++

And then there is stealing. Big brother to lying. 

Why would you steal from people who love you? Why would you take when people will easily give to you? Why make the choice that will sever the connection?

That's the whole point. To sever the connection. 

This isn’t about morals or who is a good person. Jail and punishments and talk of consequences do not fix out-of-control need.

It’s a symptom of a larger schism. In this particular case of hunger, the environment rules over genes. 

Stealing begins in the womb. 

+++++

The co-morbidities of hunger can start way before a fetus is delivered. Turns out hunger is life-defining. 

What happens in the uterus, when a fetus is developing, is directly connected to the outside world, the way the mother is feeling, her health, the things she is ingesting, but also living. 

There is epigenetics research that suggests mom’s thoughts and memories are even connected, and that the fetus might be able to feel and store her mother’s memories. (Epigenetics is fascinating. They are doing some amazing research on how the environmental impacts genes without changing DNA explicitly. Check out the work of Dr. Oded Rechavi.) 

If she is consistently poor, under-fed, starving or stressed from the impacts of poverty, addiction or living with mental illness, all of that is being felt and cataloged by the fetus. The fetus is learning about the world through the mother. 

If a mother is hungry, through famine or food scarcity, the fetus also experiences it. The fetus develops something called a “thrifty metabolism”; basically the fetus starts stealing food from its mother, taking as much as it can to be satiated. 

So, yes, stealing does begin in the womb. Hunger is the cause.

Then that baby is born. That baby will be born with a thrifty metabolism that hyper-stores food away. They instinctively burn fewer calories so they can conserve energy. This may make weight management difficult and puts that human at risk for health issues correlated to overeating, like hypertension, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. They will be more likely to pack on pounds for instance, than kids who ate amply in utero. 

And, if they are female, those babies can grow up and take that thrifty metabolism into their pregnancies and steal nutrition from their fetus. Which means the fetus will, again, have to develop the same survival strategy and so on and on across generations. 

So hunger is not a now problem. It is a problem across time and generations. 

This was studied in research around the Dutch Hunger Winter, the year 1944-45 when the Nazis retreated into Holland. In return for the Dutch assisting the Allies, the Nazis cut off food transportation in and out of Holland.  The nation starved. People ate fewer than 1,000 calories a day, half the norm. People ate tulip bulbs. Tens of thousands died from starvation. 

And just like Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, what stage the fetus manages the environmental input defines the problems that will be transmitted. So if you were a first trimester fetus and you experienced deprivation, you might get heart disease, cholesterol and weight gain during your lifetime, while starvation in the second and third trimesters put you at a greater risk for diabetes. More research has connected in-utero famine during these years with a greater incidence of schizophrenia, and addiction later in life.

And that's just inside the womb. 

For the Dutch, the famine was short enough that many children had plenty to eat upon being born. But the issues stayed with them as they aged and had their own children. 

Now, compound the stealing fetus and an early life of neglect and hunger. The implications for children are more than just about health and disease. 

They are about how you fit into society. 

+++++

Raffi has stolen from our family multiple times, mostly cash that he uses to go to the nearest Circle K gas station and buy the junk food that I generally don’t have in the house. 

And lying is also a part of that. Obviously. 

The first time it happened, a bunch of cash went missing from David’s nightstand, we felt betrayed by someone we love. I remember David saying: How could he do this to us? 

That is the feeling right there. Like a line had been crossed in our relationship. 

This is the first feeling. And it's something we had never experienced even remotely with our biological children. It feels like the horror movie where they say: “The call is coming from inside the house.” 

The danger is inside. It comes from within. 

The second feeling is: If he steals from us, what else will he do? 

We worried about what it meant for him to be antisocial in the world. For his sake and the world’s. 

But the third tier of feelings brought more clarity: Raffi’s lying and stealing are meant to break attachment. That is the whole reason for it. We read all the research and started to think about this kid we love and what is happening inside him. 

He feels the need for something and it is so outrageously overwhelming, that he is driven to fill the hole. When he does, he gets a dopamine rush, the stealing is a high. He is excited, yet also filled with shame. But even bad stuff is filling and feels good. It’s better than being on empty.

“I need a sugary drink, Mom,” he tells me right before bed time. 

The idea of being alone with his thoughts in bed, makes him need something to soothe himself. 

In the past, if I didn't provide something, he would steal it or rage or become so insistent that he followed me around the house nagging me for it. He obsessed. He worried about his hole. He obsessed more. 

David and I use attention and love as a sugary food substitute, a back rub, book reading, a talk in bed with the lights low and rain sounds in the background.

That’s right. Love is a real, tangible substitute for feeding someone. This helped a lot. But now he is older and cuddling doesn’t have the lasting effects that it had before. 

So we have turned to radical honesty, without consequences, for feeling whatever you are feeling. And us being completely honest with him about how his brain works and what he needs to do to function in the world. We work on being the kind of parents who have earned our kid’s honesty.

We listen and he talks. We try to come up with solutions together. We try to manage our emotions even when our kids can’t manage theirs. We fail. We succeed. We fail again.

Here’s what I can tell you for sure: All kids want to do well. If they aren’t doing well, no matter what they say, it’s because they can’t. I didn’t make this up.

But now it is our religion.

+++++

So, now I want to tell you that Raffi doesn’t lie anymore. Mostly. About the big stuff anyway. 

In fact he probably lies a lot less than most boys his age. 

Even when he has gotten into some deep trouble in the community, and this has already started happening, he has told us what happened even when the other kids did not tell their parents. 

“I’m scared,” he told me. 

His face crinkled up in fear before letting it all out. 

I know he is scared of our disappointment. Of punishments that might come. Of needs he might not get met. He still struggles with empathy for others, understanding how they feel and how they have been wronged by him. 

He is still learning. We are still teaching. 

But he tells the truth when it counts. And I know this is happening. Because of the conversation we had in the car. 

++++++

“I want to steal a vape,” he told me, calmly. In the car.  

I use my blank face - no emotion, no reaction. I’m here to listen. He knows about vapes because an 8th-grader in his school sold him one. Thank you, 8th-grader. 

“Hmmm…. Why do you want to do that?”

“I feel like I need to.”

“The hole again?”

“Yes. I want it.”

“Hmmm…. I wonder why?”

“It’ll make me cooler. I want to be cool.”

“That can feel so messed up if you think you aren’t cool.”

“Yeah, it's in my head, but I know Mommy (his bio mom) had an addiction to drugs and I don’t want to be addicted.”

“Yes, if she were alive, she would be so upset if you did what she did.”

I ask: “Remember what was the worst thing that happened to her?”

“Losing me. “

“Yep, she wanted you so much and loved you and her addiction made it impossible for her to be the parent you needed.”

“I can’t do drugs…”

“But I want to put things in me. Add things. Fill myself up. A lot.”

“I’m proud of you for telling me this. For knowing that about your body. I know how hard it is for you to be open about things I could get mad about.”

“How old do I have to be to vape?” 

He has a little mischievous smile now. 

I want to say like never.  Or  35. But instead I say “Can we get to 16 without a vape?”

“15. I can do fifteen,” he says, smiling. 

We shake on it. And laugh. I know from having Lucy and Edie that promises at 11 mean nothing when the teen years hit. We will confront this urge over and over, long before he turns 15. 

“I have to find good ways to fill the hole, Mom.”

+++++

Epilogue: 

In the kitchen with Raffi this morning. He drips water, on purpose, on the head of sweet, old Smudge, the pug. Smudge, dejected, runs out of the kitchen. 

“Dude, that’s not cool. Poor Smudge. “

“I didn’t do that,” he says quickly. 

“Dude, I’m standing right here. I saw you. I watched you.” 

“No, you didn’t.” 

I look at him suspiciously. 

“Your mind is going,” he says and looks at me.

“Really?” I interject. We have been here before.

“I know. I know it’s gaslighting,” he says, resigned. “Fine, I did it.”

Baby steps. 

Baby steps.