The Jonathon Letters: One Family's Use of Support as They Took in, and Fell in Love with, a Troubled Child

The Jonathon Letters gathers together an exchange of letters--over the first year of placement of a particularly wounded 4-year-old boy with a foster/adopt family--between a mother and a specialized clinician far away. Unbeknownst to the correspondents, they were recording the story of the tortuously slow and unsteady opening up of the soul of a little boy. The family happened to have that rare combination of internal and external resources that seems necessary, if any family is to survive the screaming, the resistance to attachment, the "crazy lying", the aggressiveness, the manipulations, and the rage that are often seen in children with Reactive Attachment Disorder. The reader is privileged to come to know a family with a unique persistence, and a driving energy that allowed them to keep bouncing back after each meltdown, and--ultimately--to understand Jonathon's defiance and rage as his cry for the very thing he resisted the most.