The Art Of Adoptive Parenting With Dr Ray

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees Podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Ray, Dr. Ray Gurindi. I'm looking forward to our conversation. You're in for a treat, listeners. This guy's the funniest guy we've ever had on the show, so nothing to live up to. No, no, no pressure there, Dr. Ray. No pressure whatsoever, right?

I gotta know how funny the other people are before I feel the pressure.

Yeah, it depends what the benchmark is, right? Depends what the benchmark is. So, um, listeners, uh, Dr. A is a, uh, clinical psychologist, and, and most importantly, from, from our perspective as, uh, adoptees, adopted parents, whoever is listening, he, him and his wife have got 10 kids, 10 kids through adoption. Um, so Funny and also a huge heart, uh, and I don't know, perhaps a little bit, bit nuts. 10 kids, I don't know.

I hope you don't see the twitch. I mean, it comes and goes.

He's got a— he's got a great twitch for audio. Um, yeah, uh, Dr. Ray's got a TV show and, um, and does audios and podcasts as well. So yeah, we just, we We're just here on audio today.

So, um, man, I combed my hair for this, Simon.

You combed your hair for me? And last time he got up to see me, it was some ungodly hour. I, um, but today's a little bit more reasonable time for us to, to talk. I know, what time is it with you? 9, is it?

A little after 10.

A little after 10. A little after 10 in his time zone. It's 3 here in the afternoon. So, Dr. A, thriving. What does, what does thriving mean to you?

Thriving means to move ahead, to progress, to get better. It doesn't mean that I'm just navigating the choppy waters and getting buffeted all over the place. It means that somehow, some way, I'm riding the tops of the waves.

Yeah. And so would you apply that same— that same kind of description if I said, what does thriving adoptees mean to you?

When we adopted the first child or 2, we pretty much thought we were God's gift to parenting because these were 2 children, relatively healthy circumstances. We adopted them as infants and the process, the whole process of the adoption and the first years of their lives was very smooth. And I'm figuring, okay, man, I'm a shrink. I know these things. What do you know? And then as we were more open to other kids in circumstances that were a little more risky—

Yeah.

Drug exposure or neglect or abuse. Okay, then the ride got bumpy and I had to realize what— whatever I thought about my parenting One, I was humbled. And 2, I did have to learn to ride the tops of those waves, Simon, because if I didn't, if I didn't, I didn't want to live with what did I do with my life? Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm involved in this. No. When we got a call from our local pastor and he said, Ray, are you sitting down? And I said, does this have anything to do with one of my kids? He goes, yes, we have your daughter on video, basically trying to set a fire here at the church. And I said, well, okay, Father, I will, I will be in. I didn't, I didn't want to say I want to see the video. No, because I knew full well that she's perfectly capable of that. Yeah. So the irony was, as we sat there, he said, Mary, what were you thinking when you tried to set that carpet on fire? And very calmly she said, I was a little frustrated that I couldn't get it to catch. So that's what I mean by riding the tops of the waves, Simon.

Wow. Wow. So humility, right? It's It's about a shift for you. It's about a personal shift for you. Um, what I— one of the things that I hear over and over again by the people that have been through this is that it's not— it's not about fixing our kids. It's about growing our capacity.

We were to give our children a home. And this is not a formula. If you read some of these books on parenting, on adoption, they make it sound like it's a formula. If you say the right words in the right tone of voice with the right logic, using the right reinforcement schedule, setting up win-win scenarios, using I messages, not you messages, the child will say, oh, Father, I've just been so blind.

Of course.

I see what you're saying. That's why you're the grown-up and I'm the child. It's also clear to me now. Well, very quickly, reality wins, Simon. Very quickly.

Very quickly.

And you realize, I'm going to make my best judgment on how to handle this situation. I'm not going to look 15 years down the road to say, oh, no, if I blow it now, my kid's going to be sitting in Springer talking about me and all the times that I wanted to send him to a therapist and he wouldn't go. So, that's the attitude I had to have. It was more of an attitude of, we'll take each situation as it arises. Some of the children were pretty smooth to raise. Others, it was a bumpy ride. As you talked about before we got on the program here, your ferry experience there where your dad put the wrong car on the wrong ferry. Well, I imagine that was a pretty bumpy experience. Maybe I could draw a parallel to that with some of our kids. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So it's art rather than science?

Yes, it is heart, judgment, judgment, instincts, and good sense. Somebody asked me one time, well, what, what if you were wrong? What if you, what if you made a bad decision? I said, okay. It's not a what-if. It happens. All right, I, I am not infallible. I can make judgments that don't work out, but I didn't intend to do that. See, that's the difference. I had an expert ask me one time, Simon, he said, do you have any regrets raising your children? And I said no. Oh, he got mad. How could you not have regrets? Who do you think you are? I said, if you mean regrets By I deliberately did something out of selfishness that would hurt my kids? No. Now, if you mean that I make normal human mistakes, oh yeah, heck yeah, of course I did. Why would I even try to adopt a kid if I thought that if I did all the proper procedures, all the enlightened psychological approaches, my kids would do exactly what I wished?

Yeah, you said there's no formula, and I remember chemistry, right? I talked about this yesterday, the day before, I can't remember whether it was a podcast, just one of the chats that I have with a guest before they come on. But we had a hard case. I was in the bottom set for chemistry, so we were given the toughest teacher. In the hope that that would kind of draw us into line and we would mend our ways and become better at things.

And quit designing those bombs, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I do remember some, you know, some kid holding the test tube in the flame for too long and the chemical jumping across, you know, jumping out of the test tube and hitting somebody in his face— not his face, in his hair. So he had a bit of a streak, a blonde streak or a gingery streak in brown hair, right? That was the closest we got to bombs, but no, just a bit of acid in the hair, you know.

But now, see, now that kind of streak would be cool.

Yeah, that would— like they've been to the salon for that. Yeah, this teacher, you know, but I— so this teacher, it was a hard case teacher, and not a particularly enlightened guy. I do remember though, you know, it's all about the— it's all about the formulas. It's all about, you know, writing down this— the process, right? You've got the— you've got the chemical formulas and you've got the process. You put these 2 things together, you do this, this, this, and this, and this, and this. Hopefully the acid doesn't jump out the test tube, right? You've— you've held it in too long. But it's We're kind of— we're brought up on that kind of processy kind of approach, aren't we?

Yes.

To many things in life. And then when we're confused about stuff, like we all get confused about stuff, whether it's our personal life, whether it's our careers, whatever it is, whether it's our professional stuff, we're confused and we're sure that somebody else has the process. like the process that we had at school. And then so we spend time and money with these people that talk about processes and it doesn't work. And hopefully at some point we realize it is about art rather than science.

Simon, anytime you have a child-rearing situation that seems a bit different than the norm as adoption. Okay, there's a lot of theorists out there, there's a lot of shrink types with letters after their names saying, well, now this is what you need to do when you talk about their adoption. This is what you need to do to have a half adoption day. This is how you use the language. You don't say, you don't say given up, you say placed. And all of these rules, and adoptive parents are gonna be skittish already because their view is, well, when my kid is 18, is he gonna turn on me and say, I wanna go find my real dad, not you? So they're skittish already. And the worst thing they can do is second-guess themselves. Somebody said to me once, well, aren't you kind of nervous about maybe, you know, their dad coming back into their lives? I said, Well, their dad is in their lives.

Oh, really?

Yes, I'm raising them. Yes, I am their dad. These could— these couldn't be no more my children than they are. My son said that to me one time, Simon. He said, Dad— he's about 14— he said, Dad— and he was stumbling around and I knew something was coming— would you love me more if, um, if If you know, Dad, I mean, if I— And I said, Andrew, you mean if mom and I had given birth to you?

Yeah.

I said, Andrew, who do I love more than anyone in the world? And I hope he got the answer right 'cause my wife was standing behind me. And he said, mom. I said, that's right. Am I biologically related to mom? He went, no. And that was all he needed to hear. Now, if my daughter would have asked the same question, she would have said, well, I think a lot of it depends on what you mean by love. There are certain types of love that you might be considering, Dad.

And it—

okay, that's enough, Hannah. That's enough. Go talk to Andrew.

Yeah. So, so the art— part of the art is, is personalization. It's, it's tailoring tailoring our approach and in the moment, in the moment, from my gut with, with what we know that that kid needs to hear.

There's no way that we would have adopted a bunch of kids, especially in some of those circumstances, if we were worried about how it was all going to turn out. If we were to say, boy, how will we handle X if it occurs? If we did that, we would have paralyzed ourselves. We would have said, okay, okay, okay, okay, 3 is enough. 3 is enough. We're loaded. But no, our attitude was— my wife said this at the beginning when we were looking at maybe adopting child number 5 or 6. I said, honey, why do you want to do this? She said, Ray, if not us, who? We have a solid marriage. We have the resources. You— and then she said, you sort of know what you're talking about. And she said, we have an extended family. So if not us, who? And I said, okay. And my wife has only made one big mistake in her life. That was 41 years ago, and she's paying for it ever since.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's Ray-related, is it?

Yes, her 11th child.

Or first.

Oh, good point. Yeah, there you go, her eldest.

Um, what have you learned? What have you learned about yourself? You talked about this word humility. What have you learned about yourself through, through those, through those years, right? Because all the kids have flown the nest, and I know that some of them come back We're recording this after Christmas, so some of them come back. The ones that are further away, you know, maybe not so much. So other than humility, what have you learned most about yourself through raising them?

Well, it's interesting you would ask that because a couple of books ago I wrote a book called Taught by 10: A Psychologist Father Learns from His Children. And in that book, I answered what you just asked, which is—

Yeah.

What have I learned doing this? And I'll give you a couple. I deal with an awful lot of parents, bio parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, whose main frustration is discipline. They just struggle with discipline. They are convinced that their child is strong-willed. He's a demon seed. He's got all kinds of letters after his name. Nobody on God's green earth could handle this kid because he's just so tough. And most of the time, the problem is in the dynamics between the parent and the kid. The parent really needs to polish up their discipline skills. I learned— one of the things I learned is that my children, given some of their histories, which would put them in the category of being tough to raise—

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, we had sneakiness, or we had some weaseliness, or we had Some immaturity or impulsiveness. Yeah, yeah, we had all that. You know what we didn't have, Simon? And this will surprise you. And it kind of surprised me as it unfolded. We didn't have defiance. Defiance is the number one discipline reason parents come to my office. The children simply will not cooperate. And I thought to myself, okay, what is it? What is it about me, my wife, our home that we didn't have defiance? Somebody asked my wife once, it was a lady who was having a lot of trouble with her kids. And she said to Randy, at one point, Simon, we had 10 kids under 12. She said, what would you do if one of your children simply defied your discipline? They refused to accept it. And my wife said, I don't know. And the lady said, what do you mean you don't know? Are you telling me your kids never defied your discipline? And my wife said, well, in the beginning they did, but they found out that it wasn't going to work at all. And so we don't have defiance. Somebody asked my wife, they said, well, what happens when it gets crazy? Just crazy. I mean, it's nuts. You got 10 kids under 12. Come on. This is like a fizzy bottle. And she said, well, if I feel myself getting to the edge, I'll say, everybody grab a book, sit somewhere and look at it. She could pull the plug, Simon. And the lady said, well, what if they don't? And my wife said, oh, it's definitely in their best interest that they do because there would be all kinds of consequences if they didn't. My wife knew she had to be able to pull the plug on the chaos at any point. Another thing we had, we had house rules. If I came home and I said to my wife, well, I'll give you an example. Came home one day, And my wife looked to be upset. Now, Simon, I don't want to intimidate any of your listeners because I am a highly trained professional communicator, and I don't want to lord it over them that they don't have my skills of observation. But I'll give you an example. I noticed— I picked up a subtle cue that my wife was upset. She was walking down the driveway Holding two children by the back of their necks, saying, "I do not like them, Ray. I am. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like them. I don't care." And I said, "Honey, are you upset?" See, I picked up on that, Simon. That's the kind of training I have.

Ten out of ten. Absolutely. Yeah.

And so she told me what happened, and she told me what she did. And then I did this. I said, well, guys, I said, Mom handled it. Now I'm going to handle it too, because you're not going to do that to Mom. So if Mom did this, I'm going to do this too. And so she knew, the kids knew Dad wasn't just going to question Mom. He wasn't going to say, well, Mom took care of it. I don't need to take care of it. No, they knew you rattle Mom, you rattle Dad. And that was big in our family for keeping order.

Yeah, I did used to ask if I wanted something, I'd ask my mum and then I'd go ask my dad.

She's softer, yeah, of course.

So I don't know whether they ever cottoned on to that, maybe they did. When I speak to her tonight, I must ask her that, if they cottoned on to that, because You're giving a great example of a— what do they call it— a unified front, right? A unified front. I don't know whether my parents had that unified front with my requests as well.

I call it appealing the decision. You go to the easiest parent. Kids, they really only have one goal, is to size up their parents to kind of get what they want. So they know which one is likely to say, yeah, I don't care. That's fine. Go ahead. Do it. They know. But we had a rule that if one of the parents said, no, no, I don't think so, you were not allowed to go to the other parent and say, well, Mom said to ask you. Mom said it was okay with her if it was okay with you. Well, Mom didn't really say no. I think she wanted to know what you think. So this was kind of this weaselly sort of appeal, okay? And, and in our house, if you got caught doing—

You calling me a weasel, right?

Well, yeah, but I was too, okay?

Come on.

So, you know, if that's what you're gonna do, we're gonna find out about it.

Yeah.

And one of the great things about having 10 kids— we had 5 daughters, 5 what I called estrogen Americans— and we knew that if If something went on, it was only a matter of time before one of the 8-year-olds came to us and said, Father, I have some information you might be interested in. It's kind of like a confidential informant, you know, on the streets, a narc.

A CI, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she usually wrote it out too. Here, Father, I wrote it out in case you want to read what happened.

Um, a question came to me. Um, I thought about something as we're talking about asking for permission. I think, um, so I was, uh, I was 20 and I asked my— so my, my mum, that we had 3 cars, right? So we— my dad had his car and mum had a little 2-seater sports car thing, and she also had a tiny little Jeep, a Suzuki Jeep. And so I drove the Jeep, right? And I asked my— because I was too young to drive the other 2 cars, um, and, uh, had already, uh, written off, totaled, I think you guys call it, totaled a, um, a faster car as a 17-year-old. So—

They gave you another car?

Well, they didn't, they didn't give me another car, they let me drive it. They let me drive. They let me drive the Jeep.

You were a rapscallion.

I was a rapscallion. I was, yeah. And they— I asked if I could borrow it to drive to France and Spain with my friends. And when they— and my dad said yes. This wasn't when I— this wasn't one of those ones where I asked my dad and my dad said no, and then I asked my mum. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, so When I came back, I hadn't scratched the car or dented it. It was still kind of in— well, not kind of, it was still in the same condition as it had been. Yeah, apart from some Spanish lads didn't take well to us. and put some dog poop on one of the seats, right? So there was a— we cleaned it off and there was the tiniest of stains from the dog poop. However, my dad didn't spot that bit. And but he told me that he was kind of surprised it came back in one piece. I came back in one piece.

And you came back in one piece.

And I came back in one piece. And that got me thinking about allowing to fail. You know, my dad allowing me to fail, allowing me the chance of failing. You know, right, you're going to drive this, you're going off for 5 weeks, you're going to be driving on the wrong side of the road, you're going to be doing, you know, whatever it was, 3,000, 4,000 miles. On roads that you don't know, countries you don't know, wrong side of the road. What's what's allowing? But he allowed me to fail at twenty, and I'm wondering what your your take on this area is. This this kind of theme allowing kids to to fail and guardrails and those sorts of things.

Most difficult thing that parents have, adoptive or otherwise, when their kids are adults like you were, is to say, I really don't have any control over this situation anymore, especially if they're not living at home. Yeah, you still have some leverage if they're living at home, but if they're not living at home, you don't have any leverage. And I constantly counsel parents who are in turmoil because their 24-year-old is doing this or their 31-year-old is doing this. And sometimes these things they're doing are self-destructive. There's no question about that. But the parent cannot accept that they're helpless, that this is an adult who's making decisions. Now, part of their frustration is that they take it personal. This is not how I raised you. I feel like a failure that you are doing these things. But in fact, that has generally nothing to do with it. A lot of the parents I deal with are very good people and they've tried hard and they did their best. And these kids got swept up in the culture the way it is, and they make a lot of foolish decisions. I have some like that, Simon. I, I have long since ceased trying to tell them what to do, especially when the first few times I tried, I got thrown back in my face. I always tell parents that— read the cues. If you're trying to guide this 24-year-old and it's real clear he don't want to hear it, then back off. Because if you don't, you'll probably fracture the relationship and then you got no leverage whatsoever. Yeah. So you have to just step back. Religious parents will say, I pray for them. Non-religious parents will say, well, I just hold my nose and see what happens. So, so given that, yeah, I, I, my kids are all in their 20s and 30s now and some of them are making very beautiful life decisions and others I just want to say, how can you continually be so stupid? When will you ever learn? And some of them, I almost come to the conclusion they won't ever learn, but I still love them, still have a relationship with them. I don't want to be estranged from them if I can help it.

Yeah.

Okay. Uh, one of the— here's one of the things I see among adoptive parents more than I see among bio parents. Given that an adoptive kid, because of his circumstances prior to adoption, And that includes the womb, could be tougher to raise. Could be more shortsighted, more impulsive, maybe slower to form a conscience, slower to socialize, some learning problems, quirks in the temperament, whatever it might be. There's a higher chance that as they become adults, they will do some pretty foolish things. They will get involved in things. They will make decisions that are terrible. In doing that, they often will blame their parents. I'm this way because of you, because of the way you raised me, because of your values, because of your strictness, because of your putting too many expectations upon me. Okay. I had one daughter who, after she left us, ballooned up to 420 pounds. And her view was, the only reason I'm this big is because you guys didn't let me eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. You made weight too big of an issue. Well, what was happening was she was getting out of control even as a teenager, and we had to try for her health's sake to control that. Well, she spun it around. And basically said, I blame you for the shape I'm in. On a much broader basis, a lot of kids do that. They'll say, I'm not running my life well, but that's 'cause of you, mom and dad. And if you have a higher percentage of adopted kids who do this, then you're going to have a higher percentage of adoptive parents who are going to get blamed. And I have a lot of them in my office saying, how could they do this to us? We loved them. We took them in. He was 6 years old. He had been bounced from foster parent to foster parent to foster parent. None of them had stabilized, and we're the first stable parents that he had that weren't going to leave him. You think he'd be grateful? I said, well, you don't know that he's not, but right now he's just got glitter in his eyes because he's free to do what he wants whenever he wants, no matter how self-destructive it is. And you don't know if 10 years from now he's going to look back and say, uh, I think mom and dad knew a little bit more what they were talking about. We've already had some of that. Yeah.

I want to take you back to that. You're talking about your son, um, and your son saying, you know, would you have, uh, would you love me more, um, if, if mom had given birth to me, right? If we'd given birth to him. Um, so what, what you did was you kind of— you asked him a question that got him to, to see things, to see his own answer. Um, and I think that that's a really— I think we have to, we, we, we have to get people to see their own truth. So when I, when I get near this sort of topic, if I'm doing a session with, um, adoptive parents. I'll talk about asking questions rather than telling, um, and I'll talk about educate, right? So the, the word educate comes from the Latin educare, and it's to draw out from—

Are you just trying to sound smart?

I'm trying to figure a question.

You start flinging around Latin, people just think you're smart.

Okay, well, I only did it for one year, so obviously I wasn't that good at it, or else I would have kept it on. I guess I'm trying to— when I'm explaining it, I'm trying to distract them slightly so that they see a different way. So we believe that— so when I used to do a lot of selling, and I remember hearing this Hearing this mantra, right? Telling ain't selling, right? So telling people, you know, people love to love to buy, but they hate to be sold to, right? So the the idea of a question is for that for for um the the person that you are selling to or trying to persuade of persuade them to a a new realization, a new understanding. A question is the way that does that. So you asked him a question, you said, in, in that moment, right? Um, so who's the person I love most in the world? I'm, uh, uh, Randy, my wife, uh, you, your mum, uh, and then could I do that? You know, like, but you— can you talk about this questioning thing? Because I'm talking about it from a smartass kind of Latin way, uh, and, uh, you're going to talk about it from the From the trenches, from the, from the experience that you've had?

Well, let me educate you. Okay, Simon. As a psychologist, I hear all kinds of rotgut stuff about life, about circumstances, about situations. And some of the things that I hear are pretty ugly. And somebody will be in my office telling me what they've done to people, what they've done to themselves, how they're alienating folks in their lives. Were I to say, well, don't you think that's rather stupid? What are you trying to prove there? I mean, didn't you see what was going to happen? What is wrong with you? I guarantee you I wouldn't have too much of a clientele. So I sit and I listen so that I can try to understand their thinking process, and then I start to ask. Well, when you did that, what happened? Is that what you wanted to happen? What would you have preferred to happen? Well, how could you have gotten that? In other words, I'm going to get inside their head. I got to understand what makes them tick. You know, Andrew, at that point, maybe he was really wrestling with this and he had been wrestling with it a while. I don't know. Maybe for Andrew, it was just a passing thing. I have another son. He's 29 years old now, and he says, "Dad, I get badgered by guys who say, 'Well, you know, you know, you being adopted, there's no way your parents can love you as much.'" And my son says, "I am closer to my dad than anybody in the world." He's hey, my son. He's pretty quick. He goes, "I'm closer to my dad a lot more than you are closer to yours." And he says, "Dad, they're they're." Trying to get inside his head, twist it up, and I'll ask. I'll say, "P.D., what do you what do you tell them? What do you say to them?" Well, when they say that, what do you say back? And that's you're right. That's a good psychologist really gets inside somebody's head. I'm not going to sit there and say, "Well, you know, I totally disagree with that, and that's ridiculous." And I think, okay, do it your way and see what happens. Now, that's easy to do in family relations. It really is. I mean, that's that's how marital. Spouses clash. I say, you say, I say, you say. So I'll ask a spouse, a woman will come in and she'll say, I just wish that he would one time stick up for me with his mother. And I'll turn to the guy and I'll say, do you know why she thinks that? And he'll say, Not really. And I'll ask, have you asked her? Have you asked her why she thinks that? Can you say why she thinks that? Even if you think it's ridiculous, stupid, unfair, accusatory, whatever it is, do you know why she thinks that? And that's what I mean. You got to get inside somebody's head.

Yeah. I'm thinking of a guy that I'm coaching quite a lot at the moment, the Stephen R. Covey guy, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the The second one is seek first to understand and then be understood. And I remember listening to— that was my favorite one. That was one of the favorite ones out of The 7 Habits because I thought that that was the one that was going to help me help smooth relationships the most effectively. So That's a resource right there.

There's a, there's a song, uh, by— supposedly attributed to, uh, the, the prayers attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi. He says, Lord, may I seek to be— to understand rather than to be understood.

Yeah, maybe that was the inspiration. Could be for, uh, for Stephen Arkavy, because he was definitely around later. Than Francis of Assisi.

Well, his first book was a huge seller, wasn't it?

The 7 Habits book? Yeah.

Yeah. He gave me an endorsement on one of my books, one of my early books. Covey gave me an endorsement. I don't know how my publisher got him to do it, but they did.

Yeah. Yeah. I spoke to somebody yesterday who'd met him. Great guy, apparently. Yeah. So on, um, on the, uh, subject of, of questions, what is it that you've learned that you feel that adoptive parents miss? The kind of stuff that they need to know that they sometimes miss, they sometimes don't see?

It's a delicate balancing act when I'm talking to parents who are going to adopt a child who would be considered higher risk. A kid who's been taken from his birth mom because of drug or alcohol use, a child who for the first year and a half of life, they didn't even know where the child was until they finally caught up to the child, a child who's 9 years old from Guatemala. And the thing that I tell them, I say, okay, what you're doing now— I read, and I'll digress for a moment— I read an adoption person who said you never, ever, ever adopt to say that you're rescuing a child. And I thought about that, and I said, well, wait a minute, that's kind of ridiculous because you are rescuing that child. Now, that may not be your main motive, but the reality is if you're taking in a 9-year-old from Guatemala In the circumstances he's in. Yeah, you are pulling him out of those circumstances. Now, that doesn't mean that you're not going to tremendously love this child and ride the waves. So I tell the parents, I said, on one hand, you are opening your house, your home, your heart to this kid. Got that? That's what you're doing. Wonderful thing. On the other hand, do not expect That this will necessarily be smooth. Now, I really am nervous about saying that, Simon, because I don't want to dissuade anybody from giving a child a home. But on the other hand, the worst thing is a disrupted adoption. So by the time this kid's 12, get him out of here. I didn't even know what I was getting into. Get him out of here. You know, as a therapist, I've dealt with those. So I try to brace them. I'll say, you know, just, just be ready for some bounciness if it happens. It may not happen. You know, they'll adopt a sibling group of 3, and 2 of them just give them hell on earth, but the other one's a sweetheart. Okay, all right, so you got an easy ride over here, and these other 2 are going to push the limits of your parenthood. Okay, I got that. We had a couple like that. I have one daughter in prison right now. She's in prison probably for life, okay, because of something she did. When we adopted her, her mother was— birth mother was a crack prostitute. And this poor, poor girl had her, her body bathed in toxic chemicals, not only in the womb, but thereafter. And so from the day we adopted her, it was a bumpy ride. This is the one I was telling you about where the, where the pastor called me.

Yeah.

It was her. And there's many stories like that we had. And ultimately, she, she did something very terrible. And so we visit her in prison. Okay. People will say to me, well, doesn't that kill you? If you had it to do over again, would you do that? I go, yeah, yeah, I would. Not because I'm some kind of hero, but because we did what we were asked to do. We gave Mary a home, and what she did with it, we couldn't control. It was up to us to give her a home.

Yeah. When, when did you first see that for yourself, that, um, it's not on us?

You mean about her or about the children in general?

About the children in, in general. That the, um, I'm not sure quite what the word is. that I, I know that all parents beat themselves up a lot. And, and one of the things that you said at the start was, well, I, I don't have any regrets because I did what I was— I did what was best as thought at the time, so I don't regret any of that. Um, and there's an incredible power for me that comes from that, from that statement. And then you, and you demonstrate with the example of Mary, kind of brings, brings that truth home. And, and that— is it a distance? Is it, is it a A decision? Is it— when did you first kind of see that for yourself? That just— that detachment to a certain extent? I don't know, is the word detachment?

It wasn't detachment, it was reality.

Yeah.

When I watched these children grow up and I watched all their personalities unfold, I recognized that I did not make those personalities. I mean, nature is very potent, and the research is coming out saying that over and over again. So, so in fact, I knew from the get-go I was one factor in who they were. The other factor was their inborn wiring, their nature, and the third was the culture. This is not a farm in 1880 anymore. This is a tricky culture. With all kinds of inputs from every direction. So because of that, the parenting is not simple. And I realize that my kids are going to be exposed to a culture in many ways that thinks quite differently than I do. And yes, I can protect them for a while, but once they move into the teen years and definitely into the later teen years, that culture, that voice is loud. And that voice is persuasive, and it may convince them dad doesn't know what he's talking about. Dad constricted you. Dad kept you from being your true self. So because of all of that, I recognized I only had so much power. The people who blame themselves live under this illusion, Simon, that they just simply did not apply the right formulas and the right techniques. Somehow, unbeknownst to them, they fell short. They were deficient in some way. And so, of course, that's fodder for self-blame. Why would I not blame myself? I missed it. I blew it. Look at the kid. Look what happened.

So how does this sit with defiance then?

Well, the defiance is, I'm not going to let you make our lives difficult and your life difficult. That's not going to happen. Okay? I'm a very authoritative kind of guy. I'll love you to Death. But I will not allow you to be nasty and defiant. We had a rule in our house: no mistreatment of siblings at all. No name-calling, no fighting, no taunting mean-spiritedly. That we had our— we had a rule of that. That was our rule. If you did that, at a minimum, you lost all privileges for the day.

Everything.

All privileges. You could basically look at books, pick your nose, uh, and go to bed early. As a consequence, whatever sibling brawls we had, we didn't find out about them because they got to— they got to be sneaky. They knew they better, you know, they knew where the security cameras were, so they hid their eyes so the security cameras couldn't see them.

Yeah.

They went into the corner, right?

Wore a lot of hoodies.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of hoodies with the cap and always, always put your head down. Yeah, we used to go to Myrtle Beach and we had our big 15-passenger van. It's about a 700-mile drive down to the coast. When we got there one year, I said to my wife, do you realize we just traveled 12 or 13 hours and we did not one time Have to turn around and intervene in some kind of sibling conflict. Did you realize how weird that is? Now, that's not because we're wonderful parents, Simon. It's because they knew. They knew before we left. We said, "Now, guys, I got to tell you, if we have to intervene and you mistreating each other when we get to Myrtle Beach, it's going to be a little while before you can swim. It's going to be a little while before you can have any of the good times at Myrtle Beach. You're going to sit and watch." Well, that was enough.

Yeah.

And they knew it. See, that's the thing. They knew it, Simon. It wasn't just their dad blowing smoke, even though it would kill me to do that to them. And I knew that. I hate disciplining. I don't like it at all. I don't want to discipline, but I know I have to because I don't want the world to discipline my kids. And the world will hurt my kids. After I discipline them, I hug them and kiss them and talk with them and we play. The world isn't going to do that. The world's going to punch him in the face. Yeah.

So coming up on time, Ray, is there anything that you'd like to share that I've not asked you about?

A lot of Christian parents approach me, Simon, and they'll say, I don't know if I feel called to adopt. And I'll say, well, Are you familiar with the words of Jesus?

Which ones?

The ones where he says, he who welcomes a little child in my name welcomes me. Or this is faith, that we take care of the widows and the orphans in their distress. Are you familiar with that? I said, so if you're wrestling with feeling called, he wrote it down. You don't have to go, well, I don't know what he's saying to me. Well, he wrote it down. So that's something to throw into Hopper. And I, and I tell him that, and I say, if you're afraid— and, and the number one, you, you know more about adoption than I do, Simon, but I had an adoption worker tell me one time, she said the biggest thing that keeps people from adopting is the fear factor. You know, what will they be like? Maybe they won't attach to me. Maybe I won't attach to them. Maybe my grandmother won't accept them. Maybe they're a different color than I am. What if they see this at the end of the whole journey? journey and they turn on me? What if after 18 years of raising them, they want to have nothing to do with me? And then there's all these what-ifs, all these what-ifs, and it keeps them, it keeps them from adopting. Well, we already have 2 children and life's gone pretty smooth, you know. If we adopt a 3rd kid and he's 3 years old, I don't know what will that do to our family, and I certainly don't want to take a chance on messing up my other kids. And on and on we go. We over-psychologize the whole thing, basically.

Yeah. Wow. Fantastic. Thanks so much, Dr. Ray.

Simon, I am so privileged to be across the pond with you. You know, I'm trying to pick up the lingo, you know.

Try the lingo. Yeah. Okay. Jolly good. You're doing very well.

Thank you. You got it. I've said mum. I didn't say mom. I said mum. You know, I'll share with you an experience I had, a very personal experience in America. And I don't know if this is true in Britain. But one of the things the experts tell parents is that if your child doesn't want your affection in public, don't do it. If your 13-year-old is ill at ease with you being affectionate or telling them you love them or hugging them or kissing them, don't do it. Let them decide. Now, I totally, totally went against that. There's no way. There is no way my 14-year-old is going to tell me that I can't hug them and kiss them anytime I want, anywhere I want. So my 17-year-old son was playing basketball. It's a local high school. Before the games, I'd sit up in the bleachers and I'd wait for the proper moment before the game, and I'd go down on the gym floor in front of the bench, and I'd grab my son and I'd hug him and I'd kiss him on the cheek, and I'd give him encouragement. You know, Simon, you gotta, you gotta be affirming. I said, Petey, try not to stink the joint out. And he'd laugh. And I said later, I said, hey Pete, that bother you when I do that? He said, would it make any difference, Dad? I said, no, it wouldn't, son. I'm gonna do it and just know it. He told me later, Simon, a couple of his teammates came up to him and said, I wish my dad would do that. Yeah. Wow.

Brilliant. Thanks, Dr. Ray. Thanks for listening. Pleasure. We'll speak to you very soon. Take care.

Bye-bye.