Chapters 10 and 11

The final two chapters of The Boy who was Raised as a Dog seem to summarize the ideas that Dr. Perry believe are the key to helping disadvantaged children. Chapter ten is titled The Kindness of Children and it involves a little boy named Peter and his adoptive parents Amy and Jason. Amy and Jason adopted Peter from a Russian orphanage when he was three-years old. Peter was seven when his parents took him to see Dr. Perry. Peter had a history of speech and language problems as well as challenges with attention and impulsivity. Peter also had some social and academic challenges in school.

The orphanage that Peter lived in for the first three years of his life could be equated to a warehouse filled with children. The room he lived in had about sixty children in it with two caretakers on shift every eight hours. The children there received no individual attention from adults. They were essentially caged in cribs. The children in the orphanage turned to each other and somewhat became parents to each other. They would hold hands through the bars of their cribs they even created their own type of language to communicate with each other. It was probably the interaction that the children had with each other that helped limit the damage that occurred in Peter and the other children.

When Jason and Amy adopted Peter, they knew that they would have to provide extensive help for Peter. Once in the United States, Peter worked with speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and mental health providers to help him develop more normally. Peter had improved dramatically over the four years he had lived with his parents but the progress was very slow. Amy and Jason took Peter to Dr. Perry after he seemed to plateau once he started school. Peter had a somewhat fragmented development. In some aspects Peter was a seven-year-old boy, but in other developmental aspects he was still a toddler. This fragmented development made it extremely difficult to parent Peter because Amy and Jason often had to shift their parenting strategies with Peter.

With this good foundation in place for Peter the subject of school needed to be broached. When Peter went to kindergarten, he had a very hard time because the other children did not understand Peter’s bizarre behavior. Peter didn’t understand the social cues that take place in a classroom and because of his behavior he was marginalized in school. This seemingly very difficult situation regarding school and Peter’s interactions with his peers actually wound up being the best treatment for him. Dr. Perry decided that he wanted to try to make Peter’s class into therapists for him. Dr. Perry and Peter went to Peter’s first grade class and taught the students a little bit about the brain and how it develops as you are growing. Dr. Perry then explained Peter’s situation to the class and explained that the beginning of Peter’s life was very different than the beginning of their lives. Dr. Perry explained that Peter’s brain didn’t start learning all the things it should have until he went to live with his parents and Perry asked them if they would just be Peter’s friend because Peter learns so much from playing and being around them.

This conversation with first graders was instrumental in changing the way that Peter was viewed by his classmates. The students essentially provided therapeutic experiences and helped Peter to catch up to them developmentally. All people fear something that they do not understand. With this new understanding of Peter’s unique situation, the students worked to help Peter instead of ostracizing him. From every situation expressed in this book, Dr. Perry found that “relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”

The final chapter of The Boy who was Raised as a Dog is titled Healing Communities. In this chapter, Dr. Perry doesn’t present a case that he had seen; he essentially summarizes everything that he has learned as a child psychiatrist. It is in this chapter that I find the most compelling argument about what needs to be done in our society to help these children who have dealt with such trauma. Ultimately, relationships with people matter. These relationships are the single most important tool that is needed for healing to take place. Unfortunately, so many of the children that are the most likely to experience trauma are the least likely to have a supportive family and community. People need healthy relationships in order to be mentally healthy. People need to be shown love in order to learn how to love themselves and others. The system in America for dealing with abused and traumatized children is far from perfect. In fact, this system is wholly inadequate for handling the problem and they often hurt the situation more than they help the situation.

This is where the church can come into play. The relationship between the church and modern culture is very difficult. In this situation, I believe that Christians and the church have the ability to transform our culture into something that is helpful for these children. There are so many opportunities to help. You can start at the beginning, in an attempt to help prevent trauma, neglect, and abuse by changing the treatment of new parents and infants. A little bit of knowledge about the development of children and how to support parents can go a long way. Christians should help create the community that can help families when they need it. People can learn what to look for during development. Something as simple as knowing that a baby not crying at all should be just as much of a concern as a child that cries all the time. Our society needs to not just focus on the intellectual development of children but also on the emotional needs of these children. We should want to have future generations that are not just intelligent, but children that are able to reach their full potential in all aspects of their life.

The church should have a major focus on building relationships, not just for adults but also for children. Relationships are one of the most important aspects of life. Our brain is use dependent, if we do not use the emotional, relational parts of our brain, they will not continue to develop and will eventually whither away leaving an underdeveloped brain. Christians can help teach parents about how to raise children in order to help them reach their full potential. Christians can help the children who have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect and help them to heal from their injuries, both physically and emotionally. The call of Christians is to love your neighbor and these children need love more than anything else. I believe wholeheartedly that Christians can help create a loving and caring community in order to prevent abuse from happening and also to help those who experience it to recover most fully.