Dear Heather:
As an parent via international adoption as well as a trauma survivor, I suggest a few things:
- Have you seen the original and expanded and adapted ACEs surveys in our Resources Ctr? They might be helpful.
- Have you heard of Lifebooks by Beth O'Malley? It's written by a social worker, adoptee from foster care, and adoptive mom of a child who lived in an orphanage (one person who is all of those). While she doesn't write about ACEs, specifically, she helps adults whether it be parents, social workers, or other caregivers get skills and tools and talking to kids about hard circumstances such as abandonment, war, poverty, racism, trauma, and neglect, but in kid friendly ways.
- Have you looked at the World Health Organization survey?
- With older kids, teens, I think ACE studies and surveys as well as the research on what supports healing can be helpful and using surveys that go beyond the original 8-10 or even expanded 14 questions are helpful because the others don't always include abandonment by both parents, or entire birth family, and loss of birth language, culture, etc. as well as living in foster care and/or orphanage settings. Some also don't include the trauma of adoption due to war, poverty, the one-child policy, neglect, etc. While I personally consider abandonment and neglect as well as traumatic loss as part of any adoption experience - I'd consider customizing an ACEs survey that's more specific as the goal is to help show kids (and adults) that we're all impacted by the presence or absence of adversity as well as the presence or absence of advantages, buffers, etc.
While we are impacted, and know that is true at the population level, it's also true that ACEs aren't destiny and we have a higher risk if we lots of ACEs of lots of things, but that doesn't guarantee that we'll have those things (or that those without ACEs will not). It's just general population level data and that can be shared even without going into individual ACEs or resilience quizzes - and be used to help kids and adults create language, words, and narrative which I think is the important part.
I'm sure you are aware of the great work of the Attachment Trauma Network, as well as people such as Dr. Bruce Perry who have worked with lots of adoptive families in and outside the U.S. And we have lots to share in our Parenting with ACEs community although the focus there is on the experiences of parenting and parents - which of course impacts children but isn't entirely spot on.
Please share back any tools you develop or modify as I'm sure others will be interested (I know I am).
Cissy