Nancy Thomas is the author of what we lovingly refer to as “The Reactive Attachment Disorder Bible” , or what she called When Love Is Not Enough. This book has helped us with our RAD kids more than any other resource we’ve tried. Nancy is definitely the RAD guru, in our opinion.
Nancy is the mother of three birth children, two adopted children, and one child being raised s legal guardians. She has been a Therapeutic Parenting Specialist since 1985. She has worked extensively since that time with children with all of the following ailments: borderline psychotic, ritualistically abused, abusive to animals, mood disordered, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Asperger’s, ADD, ADHD, Tourette Syndrome, Bipolar disorder, and some with histories of homicide and arson.
Nancy and her family live in Colorado in a home centered around healing the hearts of children. Nancy and her husband Jerry have shared their life and home for over 30 years with children with attachment problems. In fact, ninety percent of the kids placed in her home have killed! She has an 85% success rate with rehabilitating these kids. She specializes in bonding and conscience development.
Her accolades go on and on, and you can read about her in more detail here.
One of the most important things she has done is establish a summer camp program for unattached kids. At these camps they are able to learn with their parents in a healing environment. She holds these camps at her place in Colorado, as well as in many locations throughout the United States. Though we have yet to attend one of these camps, we know several families who have and they say it has done wonders for their families!
One of the other things that she’s recently developed are “intensive weeks” where a family can go meet with her to work on reactive attachment disorder issues in a one-on-one setting, thereby accomplishing in one week what might take you months or years to accomplish on your own at home. The people we know that have been through this program have been amazed at the change in their children.
Nancy Thomas is an amazing, caring, and knowledgeable woman dedicated to helping children heal so they can live productive lives. You can get more information on all the services and products she has to offer on her website, www.attachment.org. This is where we have obtained some of the details for this article.
The Total Transformation by James Lehman
If you’ve been looking for Total Transformation Reviews on the internet, you’ve stumbled across the right site. Quite often, the people that review products don’t actually use the product, they’ll just listen to the CD’s or read the book, and write a review based on their feelings whether the product will work or not. This is especially true about parenting courses. Unless you actually have kids to “try it out on”, you won’t know for sure whether it works or not.
So what makes us different? We’ve got five adopted kids, that’s what! With the oldest being 17 and the youngest being 11, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to test many, many different parenting styles, programs, books, courses, etc. Our kids have issues including Reactive Attachment Disorder, ADHD, ADD, Sensory Processing Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and more. If you want to learn all about the different disorders that can affect children, all you have to do is adopt five of them!
So what have we discovered? That there are tools and techniques to be gleaned from most of the resources that you try. For Reactive Attachment Disorder kiddos, our favorite is When Love is Not Enough by Nancy Thomas. This is the RAD bible, as far as we’re concerned. If you have RAD kids, you absolutely must get this book!
With all the rest of our children, we’ve found the Total Transformation program by James Lehman to be most helpful. The good thing about the Total Transformation is that it puts many different techniques together in one set of CD’s, DVD’s, and a workbook. If you want to listen to a preview from some of the actual CD’s, click here. You’ll very quickly get an idea what the program is all about.
What are some of the things that have worked for us? Here are 3, just to get you started:
1. Transition time. This is one of the most important tools we’ve learned, and possibly one of the simplest. The way it works is that when Dad or Mom get home from work, they get 10 minutes of “Transition Time” to read they’re mail, emails, change their clothes, etc. until they’re approached by the kids for requests or problems. It can also work the other way, too – kids get a 10 minute break when they get home from school to “wind down” and relax a bit before they have to do and chores, or are reminded about areas where they need to improve. Here’s a fun video we made showing this technique.
2. Direct statements. When you want something to happen, be very firm and clear. Say something like “Don’t talk to me that way. I don’t like it”. Then walk away. This is very powerful because you’ve held the child accountable, no matter how he or she reacts.
3. Be an empowered parent. Unempowered parents are unable to empower their children with the problem-solving skills necessary to be successful. Use whatever social, environmental and legal options you have at your disposal. If your child won’t get up for school, let the school deal with it in the way they would with any other truancy issues, because that’s what it is. Don’t let the kid make it your problem – put it back on them.
These are 3 skills to get you started. There are hundreds more in the Total Transformation program. It’s worked for us, it can work for you too!
One of the questions that quite often gets asked when people come to this website is does Total Transformation really work? They want to know many different individual’s opinions on the program when they don’t have anything to gain or lose from reviewing it.
(Click here to see a sample of the type of training you’ll find on the CD’s and DVD’s in the Total Transformation Program. You actually can click on each CD or DVD to preview that lesson. Especially take a look at the Jump Start DVD. See if you think this is the kind of information that might help you parent your children.)
I love the Total Transformation program, and use the tools I’ve learned from it every day with my five kids. I’ve tried to be as honest and straightforward with my Total Transformation review as possible, but I also thought it might be useful to give some unbiased opinions from others when asked if the Total Transformation really works?
So I searched the internet and found as many unbiased opinions as I could as to whether Total Transformation really works or not. So here you go!
Crystal G says:
We just bought it ourselves, got it yesterday. I watched the first disk (Jump Start) and although it kind of played like a long commercial for something I had already bought, there was some good information in there. It gave me hope that this just may help. I think the thing that jumped out at me the most was when he said “You don’t have to attend every argument you are invited to”.
Hey if this program can show me another way of dealing with things and how to deal with things in order to get a different reaction from my child than I am getting now it will have been worth 20 times what it cost… All I know is that it can’t hurt to try a different way since what I am doing now certainly isn’t working.
So, bottom line is I haven’t had it long enough to tell you if it is going to work, but just watching the first DVD gave me hope, which I didn’t have much of before that.
Diane says:
I have used this program. This program is good stay consistent with it. The first day I started putting things in motion my kids hated it. Use words like you had a choice and you choose to do this. And now because you chose this you also chose this punishment. It gives a lot of practice steps etc. I think the older your child is and how far they are gone really needs professional help, but if your children are not severe than this program can work for you.
I want to say that as a parent, you have to be very dedicated to this program and be very consistent. What I did was watched a new video every week and then practiced each level for a couple of weeks before moving on. I would say give it a try.
The program will work if you are dedicated as long as there aren’t other issues as well, my oldest son was too far gone to have it work for me and he is in a juvenile detention center, but my other children it has worked very nice.
Denise Says:
I have the Total Transformation System (bought for me by my well-meaning parents) and while I think it is probably a good system, I have to admit that it was hard for me to get through the audio CDs….they actually put me to sleep! I hope to get through the entire program some day…..
Good luck!
Seasidesu says:
I started using The Total Transformation …. a couple of months ago. What I really like about this program (and there are so many things!) is that it gave me some practical things to do immediately to help stop my son’s obnoxious behavior. Like July said, there’s a series of CDs. It’s helped me understand how my child thinks, how (and WHY) he has these outbursts and some different roles that he and I have both fallen into. It’s definitely helped me implement a more effective parenting style, and his siblings are happy, too!
So there you have few reviews. If you’re willing to work, the program works! Click here to learn more and see if the Total Transformation will really work for you too!
Being a parent of five children, I’m constantly struggling with child behavior problems, and how to deal with them. It just goes with the territory. But last week, it came to a head, and I came to a few realizations that I don’t think I had before. Here’s what happened:
My oldest son has a new “friend” that’s a girl (we don’t want them to be boyfriend and girlfriend yet, but it looks like they’re moving down that road pretty fast. More on our feelings about that in another post). Anyway, Sarah came over after school to watch a movie with Bobby. That’s it – pretty benign, right? Well, not as far as my kid’s are concerned!
You’d think the sky was falling, or we were going to Disneyland or something. They all just became out-of-control kids: loud, no manners, saying inappropriate things, and on and on. This type of child behavior problems went on all night – long after Sarah had gone home for the evening. It was crazy! I was totally embarrassed, enough so that I canceled a fun family weekend we had planned.
What I came to realize is that my kids need to have a pretty structured schedule. They feel very out-of-control when anything is out of the ordinary at all. I believe this goes back to the very first months of their lives, when they weren’t cared for in a healthy way. So we are trying to keep it orderly and under control – therefore avoiding this type of children behavior issues.
I just happened to be browsing the Empowering Parents website, and I found an article by James Lehman called Are You Embarrassed By Your Child’s Behavior? 5 Ways To Cope that helped me out concerning my embarrassment. It gave me a few tips, and I’ll share a little bit from the article.
- Don’t guess what people around you are thinking. Unless they say flat out “You’re a horrible parent”, you don’t really know what they’re thinking. They could be thinking “I remember when my kid did that”, or “I’m glad I’m not going through that phase with my son anymore”. Don’t be a mind reader.
- Focus on the behavior at hand: It’s not about you, it’s about the child. When your child misbehaves in public, they need something from you – focus on their needs, not your feelings.
- Use “avoid” and “escape” as short-term strategies. If you know the type of situations that cause your kids behavior problems, try to avoid those situations. Also, give you and your child an “escape” plan – a way to get out of the situation if things start to break down.
These are just a few strategies I learned from this article. To read the whole article, click here.
For many more tips and techniques to deal with child behavior problem’s, check out The Total Transformation. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
Recent Comments