Fostered and adopted children are often very controlling of their environments and the people within it. It’s often tough to know how to approach the controlling behaviour or even why it exists other than to assume it is simply wilfulness and lack of boundaries.

Examples of controlling behaviour:

• Dominating play with other children;
• Parenting behaviour with other children and adults;
• Intolerance of parental control;
• Becoming upset, distressed and/or angry at having their control questioned e.g:
  • Not having a choice over what to eat;
  • Enforcement of bedtimes;
  • Extreme distress at hearing “no”.

Why do fostered and adopted children display controlling behaviour?

In order to understand the need of developmentally traumatised children to feel in control it is useful to reflect on, and reinterpret, our understanding of the behaviour of babies and toddlers. It is this emotional and relational stage that developmentally traumatised children are frequently stuck in (see theory basics articles).

Babies and toddlers are instinctively and relentlessly controlling of their parental figures. Parents of newborns sleep when the baby doesn’t need them, eat if and when they get the time and shower when a brief gap in the need for childcare arises. Why are young children so controlling? The answer really is simple; they have to be! If they didn’t do all of those things then they would not get all of their crucial emotional, physical and psychological needs met. Babies have an unconscious, evolutionarily programmed knowledge of what they need to flourish, indeed to survive.

Yet we don’t view this behaviour in babies as controlling. We generally view it as an expression of need and dependence. Babies do not develop beyond this behaviour from being explicitly taught or being disciplined out of their needs. When such needs have been satisfied by a period of them being predictably and consistently met, the child has a decreasing need to exert their control. Children’s level of controlling behaviour gradually diminishes and throughout middle and later childhood the child is progressively able to meet more and more of their own needs.

Babies are instinctively controlling because if they weren’t they simply wouldn’t survive. Fascinating new scientific developments are revealing that this survival is not only due to babies’ success in being fed and protected. Evidence is now emerging that attuned, sensitive interactions with parental figures shape brain development and a lack of it may even effect such primitive brain functions as the ability to regulate breathing and the swallow reflex (1). Babies can therefore be physically well looked after yet still be at risk of physical damage, quite apart from the psychological and emotional damage that may be caused.

So, if babies’ behaviour is inherently controlling yet entirely acceptable and we understand that fostered and adopted children are invariably stalled emotionally and relationally in the baby stage then their controlling behaviour becomes entirely sensible, understandable and, in fact, necessary.

However, it’s very difficult to understand and respond appropriately to this in children that aren’t babies. It becomes incredibly challenging to empathise with the overwhelming neediness and consequent need to control of a child who can physically assert themselves, come up with attempts at verbal justifications of their “controlling” behaviour (which will inevitably be a defensive response to their own feelings of “badness” for their compulsion to control) and who is so obviously not a baby in a physical sense.

Another factor to consider when trying to understand the controlling behaviour of fostered and adopted children is the strategies which such children have had to develop in order to get some of their needs met by abusive or neglectful parents (see Attachment Theory page). Many neglected children have had to learn to control their attachment behaviour and responses to their parents in very careful (unconscious) ways in order to get some kind of care from them. This becomes ingrained as an attachment pattern, an implicit way of being that isn’t known or understood, it simply is. Children subjected to active abuse in infancy often develop the very sensible, adaptive strategy of controlling their parents to protect themselves e.g. being smiley and happy to deter aggression.

Another very significant element is that children have often had to become responsible and therefore very controlling of their siblings in a clumsy, childlike way in order to protect them from violence or to protect themselves from unwanted adult aggression or other abuse.