When Love Isn’t Enough: Amy VanTine on Parenting Through RAD

In this deeply moving episode, Sherrie Eldridge welcomes Amy Vantine, a mother, educator, and co-founder of RAD Advocates, to share her harrowing and inspiring journey of parenting a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). From her early dreams of motherhood to the trauma, confusion, and eventual heartbreak of dissolving an adoption, Amy opens up about the realities few talk about—and the healing mission she’s now embraced to support other families walking a similar path.

Key Takeaways:

• Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) Is Often Misunderstood: Children with RAD may appear well-behaved in public or clinical settings but exhibit severe behavioral challenges at home, leading to parental confusion and blame.
• Love Alone Isn’t Always Enough: Amy shared that her nurturing and affection, while well-intentioned, often triggered her daughter’s trauma response instead of helping, highlighting the unique complexities of RAD.
• Caregivers Are Frequently Unsupported—and Blamed: Many parents of children with RAD are dismissed or seen as the problem by professionals, intensifying their isolation and mental health strain.
• Parenting Children with RAD Can Severely Impact the Entire Family: Amy candidly described the toll on her marriage, her other children, and her own mental health, including PTSD, due to constant hypervigilance and emotional trauma.
• There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Therapy: Despite trying every recommended therapy and intervention, Amy found that conventional approaches failed, often making things worse rather than better.
• RAD Advocates Was Born Out of Necessity: Amy co-founded RAD Advocates to fill a critical gap, offering tailored support to families, educating professionals, and advocating for systemic change.
• It’s Okay to Make Hard Decisions: Ultimately, Amy made the painful decision to dissolve the adoption to protect her daughter, her family, and herself—a choice many struggle to understand or talk about.
• Empowering Parents Is Key to Helping Children: RAD Advocates focuses on parent well-being first, believing that healthy, informed caregivers are the foundation for better outcomes.

All Rights Reserved. @sherrieeldridge

Transcript

I have a new friend and colleague that I wanna introduce you to. Her name is Amy Vantine, and Amy is a dedicated advocate, educator, and mentor for families navigating the challenges of reactive attachment disorder. Her career has spanned roles in residential care, early childhood education, foster care, and case management as a stepmother to a daughter with spina bifida and as an adoptive mother to a son with fetal alcohol disorder, FASD, also a DHD, and a traumatic brain injury.

Wow. That's a lot. Amy understands the struggles of parenting children with unique and intensive special needs. She and her husband also served as therapeutic foster parents before adopting a child with reactive attachment disorder. No therapy or parenting strategies was addressing the root of her daughter's early trauma, and their family was unraveling.

I bet a lot of you can understand that you probably might be going through the same thing. It wasn't until she connected with other caregivers in similar situations that she realized that the true scope of the problem, they weren't just unsupported, they were blamed for a condition their child had before ever entering their family.

Amy co-founded RAD Advocates in 2017. The nonprofit has grown into a national movement, educating communities, professionals and policy makers, while providing critical support to caregivers. The advocates have educated everyone from graduate students to legislative leaders. Bridging the gap between families and the systems meant to serve them.

Our passionate mission remains clear to ensure that no caregiver facing the realities of reactive attachment disorder feels alone, dismissed, or without a path forward. So welcome, Amy. It's so wonderful to have 

you on the podcast. Thank you so much, and it's so nice to meet you. Sherry, tell us about you first.

I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Ever since a young age. I always knew that I wanted to be a mom. I have early memories of probably four or five years old playing with my baby dolls, and that was my favorite thing to do. And I think I played with my dolls well until, you know, my early, like maybe 12, 13.

But I would sneak that right. I didn't want people know I was still playing with my baby dolls, but I would sneak and play with them on the side just because that was always where my heart was. I remember as hitting probably middle school, high school, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And that was always a struggle for me because I just really just wanted to be a mom and kind of felt like, do I have to pick a career?

Do I have to pick something? You know, I wanna be a mom. I. So then I thought, well, if I wanna be a mom, I'll pick careers where I get to work with children. Initially I thought maybe I would go to school to be a teacher, you know, kindergarten teacher. And then in high school I had the opportunity to be an aide in a special ed classroom, and that really just captured my heart.

I was in high school and it was at the local elementary school, and I got to go in a couple hours my junior and senior year and work with the special ed classroom. That's where I knew I have a heart for this and a knack for this, and I just really wanted to help kids with special needs. So in my path, I started to think more about special needs developmental disabilities.

I thought that I wanted to be a social worker working in that realm. But just how things happen in life. You know, got pregnant, had a child of my own. I was married to my husband. My stepdaughter had spina bifida. She had a lot of medical needs and surgeries. My need to still work with children with special needs was shifting because I was now also helping to parent a child who had medical disabilities and learned a lot in that field.

Simultaneously, I was working as a residential treatment counselor and a program program that was in a program for adults with developmental disabilities. I really learned a lot about this system. When I think back of previous life experiences that we gather along the way that we take with us into our wisdom and knowledge into the future, I look back and I can see how a lot of my careers and job choices and stuff have led to help me now in my advocacy role.

So with that job as a residential counselor for developmental disabilities, I got to learn a lot about the system and the loopholes. The red tape of balancing the client's needs versus holding and maintaining the federal funding that was needed to provide them care type thing. So I learned a lot there how children with reactive attachment disorder really fall through those loopholes.

And it's heartbreaking because our foster care system is really set up to help children and families in need. And unfortunately how this disorder presents in the home versus out in the community or with professionals. There's a lot of missed opportunity to support effectively, I believe. 

When you were with the children with Reactive Attachment Disorder, what was it like?

How did they behave? Oh man. 

I have the understanding of what it looked like as a professional working with children with RAD versus being a parent to a child with rad. And so at one point I was a mentor to children in the foster care system and some of them had rad. I never saw any of the behaviors that would be listed in their case files.

And it would be shocking to me because I thought, oh, this child has flipped desk. This child has been violent, and I never saw any of that. So at the time I would think to myself, wow, I just must be a really good mentor to these children, and I have this really good relationship in this bond. Right? But it wasn't until later when I parented a child with RAD that I understood that dynamic more.

It wasn't that in my years of being a mentor of working alongside with children with rad, it wasn't that I had this bond with the child, this attachment, it was that I was providing a service or a good for the child. It appeared very differently than in the home, and I also was not in that mother nurturing role of trying to connect on an intimate level.

When you're in that role as a mother with this disorder, it looks very different. And what makes it more difficult is as you're trying to parent and guide and nurture, the disorder is reacting and it's putting up walls and doing everything to push away, but that's coming from a survival part of their brain.

I'm sure it was very different. I mean, you had the professional knowledge, but then how old was your daughter when you began parenting her? She was seven. Seven. We were her first foster placement. And what was homecoming day like? I remember very clear the day that she came into our home, it was late at night.

All my other children were in bed. They were disappointed in mom that I made them go to bed because they were eagerly awaiting the child that was going to be entering our home. You know, they had gone through their rooms and picked out toys and stuffed animals that they wanted to share and give to her.

We had all had a family discussion of little bit of her history and what to expect, but we were all very excited and open to welcoming her into our home. The other children were in bed. They were disappointed that they couldn't stay up late to greet her, but she arrived late. And so it was probably 10 30 or 11 o'clock at night, and I remember offering her some food and wanting to make her comfortable.

If I remember correctly, she didn't want much, you know, the caseworker let me know they had stopped and got McDonald's and stuff. She had hardly any items with her. It fit in a Walmart sack. So I remember that night thinking this is where she's supposed to be. We can provide her a safe home. We can give her guidance, love, affection, while her mother is figuring out her struggles.

And I remember she didn't wanna sleep in the room that we had ready for her. She wanted to sleep on the couch. And so we allowed that. We wanted her to be comfortable. She didn't really know our house. That was our first night. And I remember thinking, we're cut out for this. We're meant for this. We've got this.

You sure were, I mean, all down through your life. You've been prepared in so many different ways. 

Yeah. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later where I started questioning things, but questioning them. Not in a concerning way, but of this isn't what I had expected. She started calling us mom and dad and brothers right away.

Before the week was up, she was drawing pictures of her family and we were all the family and had written, you know, on there my family calling us mom and dad, saying my brothers. That kind of shocked me a little bit, but at the time I didn't know to look at that as a red flag. I looked at it as, wow, we must be doing a really good job.

Like this is what I wanted. I always wanted to be a mom, and I'm doing such a good job at that. So it was stroking my ego is what it was doing. But as time went on, those things then became red flags, where I was like, wait a minute. She's not asking about her mother. She didn't ask and I was so prepared to support her mom and foster that relationship between her and her mom.

And you know, I was just gonna be this kind of like surrogate in the meantime as they repaired and as her mom healed what she needed to heal. But I thought it was so interesting because she wasn't asking about her mom. So I advocated and started to say, I think her and her mom need therapy to build this relationship back up and, and I advocated that she must not be wanting visits with her mom because she's angry at her mom.

Rightfully so, I. So that was how I started to create the story in my own brain of what she must have been experiencing. You know, I related off of how my brain was functioning, not how her brain was functioning. 

That's a very authentic and transparent comment. Yeah. I appreciate your honesty. And can you share a little bit more about when she made the picture of you guys as the family?

What was she really saying? Were you believing that she was saying? You're the mom, you're the family. But how did you figure out that down beneath it was probably the opposite? 

How did I figure that out the hard way? Through years and years of trying to connect and create this intimacy and trying to create this bond.

And what I found is the more that I was doing that, the more aggressive her behaviors became. 

So that was your dream really, to have intimacy with her and connection and bond and everything? 

Yes. And honestly, that didn't come until. I knew she was, that adoption was on the table. Prior to that it was, you know, we can foster and Oh, she sees us as family, but okay, I'm glad that she's safe.

But I didn't really open my heart up to it until I knew that reunification home for her was not going to be an option. And then that's when I did this shift of accepting her as my daughter. And accepting her as that, to have to work towards more of that intimate connection instead of, you know, the fostering.

I believe that's a beautiful connection that God gave you in your brain. I mean, in your soul. I mean, even when you were a little girl, that empathy, yeah, that's what you wanted to see lived out as a mom. And, uh, a lot of times I think moms put a lot of pressure on themselves to live up to that dream, but it isn't always possible because we're so broken and we live in a broken world, right?

Yes. So it's hard. 

Yes. And it takes two for that relationship and two for that dream. And she wasn't in a, a space or a time of her life where she could do that. She had a lot of her own trauma and needed her survival mechanisms put up for her protection. She was not able to do that or capable, honestly.

Was there a breakthrough, Amy, with your daughter? Did she continue in that kind of pushback, a mode, or did she gradually begin to receive you? 

No, she continued to push back. The more she pushed back the different therapies, I would try. I just went into mama bear mode of, I can see that my child needs help the same way that I did with my child with spina bifida the same way I did with my child with fetal alcohol, the same way that I did with my neurotypical children who were a little bit more on the gifted side at the spectrum and needed more.

Challenges at school to keep them focused. I did the same for her. You know, I was gonna advocate for her and go into what my role was as a parent of locating the resources that she need to help her thrive and to be her best. So the more she reacted to my relationship, the more I researched and the more I said I'm gonna find it.

You read every book, right? I read every book I did. We tried every therapy, everything. The next red flag was nothing was getting better. It was only getting worse. So instead of like doing a therapy, like equine therapy, you know, she loved horses. Let's go to equine therapy. And we found this most amazing equine therapist that, you know, had all rescue horses.

And the horses come from hard stories and the children get to pick their horse that they can relate to and. I was so hopeful, but with it, we only saw more setback. It was never like, okay, this is a little bit better. You know? There was no measurable outcome of this is helping in any way, shape, or form, because of course I didn't expect her all of a sudden to heal and for everything to go better.

That's not how healing works. You know? It's not a magic cure, but I was expecting some progress not to be met with. Further setback or further escalation. So everything we tried, we were just getting further and further in crisis. That is when I actually had the aha moment. I. Of this is rad. This is not what I had learned about rad.

This is not what therapists are teaching me about attachment. This is rad. She is reacting to my nurturing and love everything. I had read a lot of the information out there and therapists and stuff. Understanding is that with attachment issues, you meet it with more connection. You meet it with just more of providing that safety and that trauma informed approach.

And so the more that I implemented that approach, the more violent she became. And that aha moment for me was she is in her survival mode. She is so stuck in fight and she doesn't have a felt sense of safety with me. The more that I am engaging her, and the more that I am the one as her mother trying to redirect her and comfort her and co-regulate her, the more I am triggering her because that is what she's reacting to.

And that must be so discouraging for you to know that your very being, which is full of peace and love could be a trigger, right? It absolutely was a trigger. Oh my goodness. And when I had this eye-opening moment, I. To be honest with you, it was a very emotional time. She was having a, a rageful moment headbanging and being unsafe and hurting herself and trying to run and you know, all of the fight, flight, freeze.

It's responses just fully there, and I'm trying to coach her through it and walk her through it, and she's spitting in my face and spitting luies at me and I'm trying to not react and letting her know that whatever you do, I'm still your mother. I still love you. You can't push me away. And at one point I actually sucked a luie out of her mouth.

I just kissed it right out of there and said, you can keep spitting at me, but I am your mother. I'm not going to reject you. But it was that moment where it was like, oh my gosh, this is what is triggering her. She doesn't know how to receive this love and nurturing. 

She doesn't know what it is. I mean, adoptees don't know what love is.

No. And as the more we pushed her and the more we were trying to get this relationship going the way she became, so that's when my role really had to shift as a mom. To just being her advocate, to being her cheerleader of this is not the environment for her. When she came to our home, she was not suicidal or homicidal.

When she left our home, she was homicidal. What is homicidal? I had stab marks in my mattress. She would often verbalize that she wanted me dead. You know, in my approach to try to help her heal. When she's saying, I hate you. Get away from me. I wish you would die. I just accepted that of, you know, it's okay to feel that way.

You can't get rid of me. I'm not going anywhere. You know, when we choose to be parents, we don't think that our kids don't get a choice to not be our kids. You know, like, I'm your parent. This is how it works. But in our situation, and for her, that did have to be her choice. 

And so how far are we at that point?

How old was she at that point? She was about 11. Okay. And at that point is when I started asking for even more help of like, we need out of home placement. This in-home is not working. She is not ready with her trauma. She is not ready for our home environment. I would like to say that during that time, I pulled back then on my parenting and I went more into transactional parenting.

You know, I'm not now going to be love and logic parenting. I'm not gonna be attachment parenting, Velcro parenting. So now I'm shifting to this. Transactional rock kind of parenting, and I just explain what that is real quick, where it's really not relational. It's more like a business transaction, you know, here's the expectation of the home, here's the house rules.

But it's not being done in a nurturing way. You know, it's not, come sit on my lap, let me brush your hair, let me cook you your favorite meal. None of that type of affection. It's more based around, these are the house rules and we're gonna provide for you, but not in a nurturing way. But how this disorder works is once I pulled back, she already knew all about me and my vulnerabilities.

And my personality and my character and how we lived in our home, even though I wasn't directly giving that to her anymore, she was still reactive to me. And I believe it's because children with this disorder see love and affection. They see it and they crave it. They want it, but she didn't know how to receive it.

And so when I visibly pull back and then I'm not doing that, it became this like push pull relationship. You don't love me. You don't treat me the same way as my brothers. Okay, but when I do, you can't receive that. You know, you become violent. And so it was really this push pull. She felt very rejected.

If I didn't treat her the same way as the other kids, but when I treated her the same way as the other kids, she just could not handle it. And more and more she would just push buttons to create chaos because that's where she felt safe. 

Can you tell us what the effect was on your other children? I mean, don't they call siblings, glass children?

Was it. Honestly, that is the hardest part for me and for most rad parents to swallow, to adjust to is we willingly and openly made a decision to bring a child in thinking that we could nurture and love and give all of our children the experience of having an open heart and compassion and caring for those that are less fortunate.

I. Instead, I really feel like I put them through unnecessary trauma. The very thing that I always wanted to protect children from domestic violence, they were exposed to that. There was a lot of yelling in the house, banging of furniture and walls, and holes in walls, and alarms on doors for safety, and they witnessed me being attacked in the car by her and just the constant destruction going on in the home.

They would flee. They would flee to their friend's house, they would flee to their bedrooms. They began to isolate. They knew not to say what their needs were because they didn't wanna create more of an issue, more of a problem. And then they internally, they also feel protective of you. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. And that was end of each other. And so it was just this really harsh dynamic in the home. 

So Amy, tell me about you in, in the process. I mean, it must have just exhausted you end up with PTSD. 

Probably the kids did too. Yes, all of us and my husband. Yeah. The more that I tried to seek out help, and when I found that I was not finding the accurate help that we need, a lot of the therapists that we worked with were amazing therapists.

A lot of the supports that we had were amazing supports, but not for what we were specifically dealing with. And the more that they were giving me advice and the more I'm trying it and it wasn't working, I internalized that, that it must be something I was doing. It must be me that's broken because my child is fine with everyone else.

They are saying this is the studies for attachment and so it must be me. I must be the one broken. So I had this self dialogue going that I needed to be better, try harder, do more for the love of my child. And the more violent and aggressive she became with me. She was very verbally abusive and when I say she was abusive, not to villainize her in any way, like I understand it was all coming from her fight, flight, survival brain, but the behaviors were very abusive.

Hard to manage. And when it becomes where it was all waking hours, there was no breaks. If she wasn't being physically aggressive, she was verbally aggressive. So even in the rare moments that she would be in her room isolated for the behavior, it would still be these horrific verbal. Attacks along with the banging on the walls and breaking things in her room, and holes being put in the walls.

So it does create PTSD and hyper vigilance of having to walk on eggshells. And I remember many mornings feeling like, I need to get ahold of this. I need my prayer time. I need my alone time to connect with myself to figure out, I. How do we get through this situation? And I would try to sneak down the stairs and I knew exactly what stairs would creak and I couldn't step on them.

Because I didn't want her to hear that I was awake because as soon as she knew I was awake, then all chaos would start. So living in a environment that's supposed to be your safe place, your home where you go for refuge and where you go to regroup and refueled was not that for anyone in our family, including her.

So she brought all her trauma from her past into your home? Yeah, and we all lived it. And we all lived it. 

Well, Amy, do you mind if I ask how old she is now? 

She is grown now. Yep. She will be 20 next month. And how is she doing? I dunno. I have not had contact with her. We dissolved our adoption when she was, I believe she was 13.

Well, how do you dissolve it? Tell the parents how you do it. Honestly, it's just different. It depends on the state that you're in. It depends on the route you take for it. For myself, we ended up placing her back in the child welfare system where we adopted from. It's not just that easy, is that you just place them in the system.

I ended up reporting myself to child welfare multiple times, saying that we had a child at risk, and that our home was in danger, that she was at risk. I don't understand. Tell me more. I recognize because of her behaviors, I could not keep her safe. However, when I would try to get her a higher level of care of like a residential treatment center or an acute hospital stay for stabilization, she would appear just fine because that's how this disorder is.

The nurses would love her, right? Yes. As soon as she would. Be assessed by anyone. The disorder presents very differently and it mask itself, and that's a reaction of needing to survive. There's a new person that entered the equation, I need to evaluate that person so they can put their guard up. And so it was very scary actually, of how quickly she could turn on and off her emotions.

And so anytime we were having her assessed, she never met criteria, but in my home, I knew we were in crisis, that I could not keep her safe from herself, from her behaviors. She was climbing out on the roofs of the house. She's harming herself, but also simultaneously I knew that I was also not in a good head space.

That I could not continue. It was years of day in, day out crisis and no relief that I couldn't continue. The other deciding factor and this day was clear as day was when I saw one of my other children hit their rock bottom two. And I remember hearing his frustration and I thought, if he feels this way, how can I expect him as a young teenager to manage his emotions when I'm struggling as an adult also?

Yes. And I just knew we were all in crisis and I thought, I need to call child welfare. Because we will be that next family on the news of something horrific happening, and I didn't know what that looked like. I was scared because I didn't know if she would harm us, if I would harm her, or if one of my other children would harm her out of protecting me.

What an honest answer. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think a lot of parents will appreciate you sharing that because they don't know what to do. So Amy, how can you tell when a child is acting out of trauma or they're just being mean? I hear a lot of that on social media and stuff with people that will say, well, my child was just being mean all the time.

And you think that's a reaction of trauma? 

I think it just depends on, well, first of all, do they have history of trauma? Is there that history of trauma? And I don't know how to tell if it's mean or trauma. I feel like even if it is mean or trauma, that when you are redirecting a child and giving them strategies to manage whatever emotion is behind that mean behavior and you're not seeing a change, that's when it becomes more concerning of, is this brain development trauma?

You know, is this something more like rad? Or is this just a short behavior that they're going through that's developmentally appropriate? 

Tell us about RAD Associates. 

Yeah, RAD Advocates. So what we do is we. Really join in with parents, not just adoptive parents, but it may be stepparents, it may be biological parents, but we join in with them in their journey of parenting a child with reactive attachment disorder to provide them the support that is needed.

That support can look different depending on the family, so it is specifically tailored to the family's needs. Children with reactive attachment disorder can have all different types of behaviors given different parenting styles given different, you know, dynamics to the family. And so whatever their family dynamic is, we support them on what they are needing to navigate this.

When I say support them, meaning the parents, we approach it as if the parents are well, then the family is well. So as long as the parents are in a good place, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, we can support them doing the hard things. The hope is, is that they can do the hard things longer, and we honor that by allowing them to be vulnerable with us and meeting them exactly where they're at.

So if a family is in a position where they feel they're not being heard by therapist or doctors, we help provide language or a strategy of how can we get them to see what's needed in your home. Or if it's, they've decided their child needs a higher level of care, we help them navigate the system into getting that level of care, providing documentation and video footage to show, you know, all the things that I wish that I would've had in the time when I was walking through it.

Well, you know, I think this must be your life purpose, Amy. I really believe that God landed me here for a reason. I, I love what I do. I love that I'm able to fulfill this need for families. I feel very honored that I get to be in families' lives. It's such a hard time for them. And to nurture them through it.

And so really, I work with parents, which is not at all what I thought I would be doing of working with children. But through that I realized that it's when we support parents, when parents are good, we're gonna have healthy children. 

Yes. I love what you're doing. I just will tell listeners that everything that Amy, all the resources that she has will be put on up on the site when it's published very soon.

So you're gonna tell us about Red Advocates and maybe any other opportunities? Uh, I mean, do you have conferences and stuff like that? Yes, we do. Every year. We've taken this year off so we could revamp our conference a little bit. We don't call it a conference, we call it Nav Rad because it's an experience.

Our first couple of years, we've done it for five years and parents are always saying, I've never had an experience like that. So we call, call it an experience more than a conference and that's where we dive right into, I. Reactive attachment disorder, what it looks like, how it presents in the home, but in our nav rrAD experience, we are actually taking three days to help parents navigate through the disorder.

We developed a workbook and it's based off of the workbook and it's written in a way that parents can navigate it on their own, but we offer that guidance over the three day weekend. And then in conjunction with that, we do offer memberships and we have different levels of membership that offer different support to families based on where they're at in their understanding of rad or their parenting journey, what their needs are.

Wow, what a mission you're on. I really admire you for it, and I'll always be here cheerleading youon. Thank you, Sherry. It's organizations like yourself and podcasts and stuff that help make the change for all families and all children. I love this collaboration and I love what you are doing, creating education and awareness on all different topics around adoption.

You know, it's important and very needed. 

Thank you. Yes, I'm working on my ninth book right now. I'm really excited about. I may be co-authoring it with somebody and I'll tell folks about that some other time. I. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you, Amy, so much. You're welcome. I've just really enjoyed my time with you and, um, I wish you all the best with your work.

Thank you so much. So thanks for tuning in. 

I love you. Bye.