Let's Play Dumb, Part III

As promised here, today I'll post about what I can happily call "what used to be our daily shoe fiasco". That's right, it's no longer a daily issue and I can actually say it's becoming a rare occurrence. It's always so much nicer to blog about an issue after we have successfully come out on the other side of it :) Yay for progress!

Apparently, doing weird things with your shoes is a thing for kids with attachment issues. Remember when Jenny walked out of her shoe in the middle of the street and we all had to watch as it was run over repeatedly?

Or when Shirley lost her shoe in the corn maze or the numerous times she just couldn't keep them on her feet while in the stroller or the time she tried over and over to lose a shoe at Disneyland?

Well, Dusty has shoe retardedness as well. When she first came, she tried the walk-out-of-my-shoe routine, but soon decided that was not fun enough and adopted the put-my-shoes-on-the-wrong-feet-everytime-I-put-them-on routine instead.

Here she is walking down the street with one shoe on:

And that's exactly how we deal with that issue. If you want to walk around with one shoe on, it only makes you more uncomfortable, so knock yourself out.

Dusty has been with us over 7 mos now and just very recently, she stopped putting her shoes on the wrong feet. So, for more than 6mos, she put her shoes on the wrong feet every time she put them on with very few exceptions (and in our house this is several times a day b/c we take our shoes off at the door).

Now, how did we deal with it? At first, I would verbally remind her that her shoes were on wrong and to fix them. In the beginning, fixing them took her forever. She would take them off her feet, switch them around a few times and put them back on the wrong feet. Other times, she may take them off, look at them, look at me, appear very confused and just sit there. Once we determined this was a ploy to waste all of our time as we were on our way out the door, we started asking Dusty to get her shoes on immediately in the morning, before eating breakfast or anything else. That way, if she was going to waste time, she'd be wasting her own time, not ours. We also started sending her to her room to fix her shoes. That way, she couldn't sit and stare blankly at us as if she didn't know how to put her shoes on. The longer she took to fix her shoes, the longer she stayed in her room. This totally worked, in that, she immediately switched her shoes and was out of her room in seconds. It didn't immediately work, however, to get her to stop putting them on the wrong feet in the first place.

Over time, she started to have days where she put them on the right feet, every time, all day long. There were very few of those days, but they existed. Soon, the shoes became our barometer for measuring Dusty's internal state, how regulated she was that day. She may start the day out putting them on the wrong feet and typically that is how her whole day would go. Other times, she would start out great and something throughout the day would happen and I'd find myself saying in my head "she's going to put her shoes on the wrong feet". And I was right.

And now, she puts them on the right feet almost every time and almost every day. Progress. And to the extent that this tells me something about her internal regulation, emotional progress (even better!)

So, for those of you that wonder, what if you just said nothing or did nothing? Just let her wear her shoes on the wrong feet? Well, I had those same thoughts. And actually for close to a week long period, I actually did that. I just said nothing about her shoes, did nothing, let her wear them that way. However, I found that it still frustrated me that she did it and I wasn't as successful at just letting it go as I needed to be for this approach to work. Then I had a discussion with my husband and his take on it was this:

You told her to go put her shoes on. You gave her a direct instruction which you expect her to follow. And putting them on the wrong feet is her small way of being defiant. It's like saying "ok, I'll put them on, but not the way you want me to". In other words, "Eff you, lady. You aren't the boss of me". And the reality is, we see this behavior of challenging your authority at every turn with attachment disordered kids. And just as I have said before, it's crucial they learn you are in charge. Not because you want to be the big scary boss, but because you need to be in charge. They need you to be in charge to take care of them, meet their needs, keep them safe. And even small challenges to your authority need to be met with a (gentle) reminder that you are the boss, even of how they put their shoes on :)