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By Michael Trout and Lori Thomas
Published by the Infant-Parent Institute
192 Pages
ISBN 0-9761546-0-9
$22.95 Print
$29.95 Audio Format

"The Jonathon Letters: One Family's Use Of Support as They Took In, and Fell In Love With, a Troubled Child" gathers together an exchange of letters over the first year of placement of a particularly troubled child with a foster/adopt family in Virginia-between Lori Thomas, the foster/adoptive mother, and Michael Trout, Director of The Infant-Parent Institute in Illinois. Unbeknownst to the two parties, they were recording the story of the tortuously slow and unsteady opening up of the soul of a little boy.

The family happened to have that rare combination of internal and external resources that seem necessary if it is to survive the screaming, the resistance to attachment, the "crazy lying", the aggressiveness, the manipulations, and the rage that are often seen in children with Reactive Attachment Disorder. They had friends, faith, a sense of mission, a reason to put everything aside each day, and a marriage that could sustain blow after blow. But they also had a unique persistence, which may be what drove them to reach halfway across the U.S. to find the level of developmental guidance and continuous support that they knew was needed, and to tell such a compelling story that Mr. Trout could not turn away.

At the end of it all, the family made a decision to adopt, and the mother in Virginia and her supporter in Illinois saw that they had a record that might be of value other foster or adoptive parents who were fighting to stay the course, to keep themselves from disrupting yet another placement of a wounded child who was tearing them apart. There is nothing about the story told in "The Jonathon Letters" that suggests an easy treatment, or that offers clever strategies to restore trust to a child who has no reason to believe that accepting love could ever be safe. It is a tale of ups and downs, because that's how it is with children whose beginnings have been so tortured. But the reader begins to get a sense of the driving energy of this unique family, who somehow bounce back after every regression, and find ways to understand Jonathon's defiance and rage and to remain connected to their purpose.

In the preface to "The Jonathan Letters", Mr Trout writes:
      " Our hope is that these letters will be meaningful to you. If you are a parent, we hope that they will support you as you fight through your own ambivalence and your child's extreme resistance to find a way that you can survive, and your child can get what she needs. If you are a professional, we hope these letters will encourage you to stay with a family who is at risk of being torn apart by the multiple, exasperating, seemingly-inconsistent needs and constantly-changing behavior of a child who has seen pain few of us can imagine - and who offers not the slightest gratitude to a family that earnestly wants to make it all better for him. We hope you find, in Lori's forthright answers to my repeated questions about what made her stick to it - what in her past, what in her marriage, what in her heart, what in her faith - something that is meaningful to your own battle to figure out the answers to the same questions. Lori taught me that there really are some identifiable characteristics of families who are likely able to go the distance with attachment-disordered children. It is not a job for everyone. It is not about being "good" enough to handle such children. It is about having the resources - external and internal - that will allow you to do things that are just not natural. I don't know that I have those resources, but Lori and Paul did."