"The Jonathon Letters" home
Reviews
Quotes From The Book
Exerpts
About the Authors
Media Resources

"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 between a foster/adopt mom and a specialized clinician far away. Their common interest: the struggle between a particularly wounded four-year-old boy who was certain he could not be loved, and the family with whom he had been placed, who were determined to love him. Unbeknownst to the correspondents, 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 any family 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. The reader is privileged to come to know a family with a unique persistence, and a driving energy that allowed them to keep bouncing back after each regression, and - ultimately - to understand Jonathon's defiance and rage as his cry for the very thing he resisted the most.