My adopted teenage son has fasd ama

[Fasdmama]

Ama but please bare in mind I need to protect his privacy so some things I cant talk about. I want to do this to help people understand fasd more.

Maybe all their empathy is for the child who suffers? If an alcoholic drove into a child and caused life altering injuries would you have empathy for that driver? I don’t see the difference to them harming the child in utero. Either way they’ve hurt a child.

Sometimes, when you see glimmers of the person your child could’ve been, it’s difficult to have empathy for the person who destroyed that. Not all people who are irresponsible have traumatic pasts, although I agree many do.

My daughter will never be able to live independently; she has seizures, SLD, and has no concept of consequences. She has attacked and hurt people, including me. We have had over 25 years of trying to help our daughter navigate a world she doesn’t really understand. If my empathy is low, that is the reason why. We have BM’s form F. No huge trauma, or even small trauma, but perhaps a personality disorder.

My son is also a horrendous sleeper and we arw trying different types of melatonin. We can get him to sleep now but he wakes up at 3am it’s awful

😳

Neither the previous comment, nor the needlessly rude comment that followed gave an indication that this poster has a thorough understanding of FASD. I would also doubt that they are in fact a medical professional given their very poor grammar and spelling. Mine is far from perfect, but come on, they are clearly not a professional of any type.

Nevermind the 'had of had' earlier too, who on Earth would refer to their child as an 'it'?

Its so annoying when threads get derailed by angry idiots who think forums are the perfect place to let out a bit of passive aggression.

I wondered if anyone thought that the policy which tries to reduce fasd by telling women that even low levels of alcohol cause harm when there is no evidence of that, and fails to actually address and develop effective interventions for women who can’t stop drinking because of all the other stuff they have going on - means we can’t tackle this?
when you look at the evidence actually a relatively small number of women who drink to excess during pregnancy have children with the classic fas symptoms and a number of other factors are known to play a role. Genetics are one of them, but nutrition is a huge one.
this is not surprising in that many alcoholics do not eat properly. It’s interesting that there is some crossover between fasd in infants and the neurodevelopmental challenges experienced by babies whose mothers had severe hyperemesis and so could not eat properly. If we could actually say to women, we understand you can’t stop drinking and we will support you with this, here is an effective intervention that helps mitigate the risk of your child being born with challenges. But we won’t even investigate this.
women don’t drink to excess in pregnancy because they don’t know they are causing harm and just need a sticker on a vodka bottle with a “pregnant women shouldn’t drink in pregnancy” on. They do this because their lives are complex in a way few of us can imagine. Currently our way of addressing fasd is “more information”. More telling women at booking that they shouldn’t be drinking. This is not the answer.
i really disagree with the advocacy approach of the active fasd parenting groups. I don’t think it is helping the women who most need help, or of course their babies, or ultimately the parents who go on to adopt three children.

Money. Cheaper not to do that!

Additionally, there is a very high correlation between ND and addiction.

I remember watching a documentary years ago - I can't remember if it was about FAS or about drinking in pregnancy (they may have been 2 separate docs), but there was a woman with her son who had FAS. She was an alcoholic and didn't know she was pregnant until the damage had been done. She stopped drinking when she found out she was pregnant.

She had such deep sadness and regret about what her drinking had done to her wee boy, and he was just oblivious - a happy wee chap - but the effects were obvious.
FAS is so so sad. People whose lifelong potential is altered by something preventable.

OP, I’m a mum to two kids by adoption. One seems to me to display lots of signs of FASD but I’m hesitating about pursuing a diagnosis.

Do you think it’s worth it, when there’s no treatment or support? I know understanding is important. I can’t make up my mind and I’d be very grateful for your opinion.

DS is 7. We have no concrete evidence of BM drinking but it’s a strong possibility, for all the usual reasons.

@gotmyknickersinatwist in my (admittedly quite limited) experience, the birth moms I know of show no remorse whatsoever and go on to have more children whilst also drinking. I struggle to understand them but obviously I know there is far more to the situation and I feel very biased about it because of my son.
That lady you mention however I do feel genuinly sorry for.

The latest research is showing that a man’s drinking before conception can create epigenetic changes in sperm, increasing a baby's vulnerability to FASD and other health issues like by altering how genes are expressed, making paternal abstinence crucial for optimal foetal health.

@rainallnight hi, I would definitely say to pursue it. For me it helped us see how to deal with some of ds' issues (like I said before how to help someone with fasd is different to adhd) but more importantly we could use the diagnosis to get the school's to help them in the correct way.
Please feel free to msg me of you want to chat more

I'm logging off for the night now as ive realised I'm not making much sense. 🤣
If there's any more questions I'll try to answer them tomorrow

Ooh Hopping won't like that at all @ThePieceHall
Prepare to be told off for mansplaining and not knowing what he/she already knows.

Shall I give you a few examples of the types of issues I/we have to deal with? Daily extreme violence. Daily extreme aggression. Daily horrible verbal abuse. Regular stealing of anything that cannot be nailed down in the house. The police turning up pretty much once a week because the neighbours who hate you (and who can blame them) dial 999 at every bout of demented screaming. Oh, and the false allegations because FASD kids ‘confabulate’ ie ‘tell lies’. Personally, I would never recommend spending 21 hours in a police cell on a false allegation of common assault. It’s not exactly up there on my bucket list.

What was the process like to get an echp?

Sounds like a really hard time :(

I’m not the OP, but I do know that a diagnosis of anything will help children access the help they need throughout school.

Thanks so much for sticking your head above the parapet. Such an important public service announcement. You were very brave. I totally get why you are doing this as one NAS/FASD adoptive parent to another.

Everything else being equal your child wouldn't have FASD just because you didn't completely abstain from drinking, but they might have been mistakenly diagnosed as having it if many of their characteristics coincidentally match those of FASD.

So sorry to be the Bad Fairy on this thread but diagnoses don’t always help our children access support. There is a crisis in adoption (and fostering too) because adopter numbers are falling off a cliff due to the extreme challenges of parenting society’s most vulnerable children without any meaningful help or support. My AD1 is blind due to her in utero experiences of drugs and alcohol and she has multiple other complexities and disabilities; she has never been supported by the state. Next week, when she turns 18, she will be moving to a homeless shelter. No doubt people will judge me but I - and more importantly - my younger AD cannot live in a domestic abuse situation any more.

This does sound really hard and I hope you get the support you need. This response is more to some of the replies to your post, rather than your post, but adult adoptees like me and others have been forming organisations that represent us (like the Adult Adoptee Movement) so that we can speak out on issues about us - on the principle of 'nothing about us without us'. Oftentimes we get spoken about - often as problems - rather than seen as people who can speak for ourselves. Adoptees have written themselves about issues like healthcare for adoptees and how poor it is, and how difficult it is to navigate adoption as an identity. We aren't just babies being handed over to adoptive parents as a problem, birth parents aren't always awful people, and some adoptive parents, sadly, do not parent adoptees well.