FAQ

Food behaviours that look like hoarding or stealing usually have several roots tangled together. For children with FASD or early trauma histories, they’re often connected to impulse control (the child sees food, the brain acts before the slower thinking catches up), memory differences (not consistently remembering that food is available or that they ate recently), anxiety about food availability rooted in earlier scarcity, and difficulty recognising internal hunger and fullness cues — so they eat based on opportunity rather than need. The behaviour is rarely about deception and almost never misbehaviour in the ordinary sense; it’s a brain and body trying to manage uncertainty around something fundamental.

It’s worth saying clearly: food hoarding is not a failure of caregiving. Your child is bringing patterns from earlier in their life into your home, and with time and consistent support those patterns usually soften.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Yes. The mismatch between calm-at-school and falling-apart-at-home is one of the most commonly misread patterns in FASD caregiving, and without the home picture school staff may assume things are going well overall. Sharing what you see is not complaining — it gives the team a fuller view of how much effort the school day is actually costing your child.

Watch for patterns and bring them to the teacher or school team — worse meltdowns after PE day, after a fire drill, on test days. Those patterns often point straight at what’s hard during the day, and naming them frequently surfaces school-side supports — more breaks, reduced sensory load, planned check-ins — that ease the strain on your child’s regulation budget and soften the collapse at home.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

This is the reverse of after-school restraint collapse, and it points the same way: behaviour for a child with FASD is heavily shaped by environment, sensory input, stress, and expectations — not by intention. If school is the harder setting, the school environment is overwhelming the nervous system in real time, while home is the regulated baseline.

Your home calm is useful information for the school team — it helps them look at what environmental factors at school are pushing your child past their capacity. Share what you’re seeing through the classroom teacher, learning support staff, or an IEP / learning support plan meeting so the supports can be adjusted to reduce the load during the day.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Predictability carries a lot of the load. Keep the same sequence each time — what happens in the morning, how you travel, what happens when you return, what the evening looks like — and use a simple visual schedule (wake up, breakfast, get ready, drive to visit, visit, come home, snack, quiet time) so your child has a concrete map of an otherwise unfamiliar day. Keep arrivals and departures calm, scripted, and brief, since those hand-off moments are usually the highest-load. And treat the hour or two after a visit as recovery time, not a time for demands, questions, or chores — much like the after-school period.

Share the patterns you notice with the care team (“regulated in the morning, falls apart on the drive home, takes 24 hours to settle”). Your social worker and resource social worker can use that to adjust the timing, location, supervision, or frequency of visits. For a placement transition on the horizon, advance planning makes a real difference — a predictable timeline, visits to the new home beforehand, familiar objects travelling with the child, and continuity of supports through the change.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Transitions are particularly hard for a child with FASD. The same brain-based features that make ordinary daily change difficult — executive functioning, emotional regulation, working memory, managing change — show up far more intensely around bigger shifts like family visits and moves. There’s often emotional weight on top of the cognitive load: visits with birth family can stir up anticipation, attachment, anxiety, grief, or confusion about where home is, feelings the child can’t always name. Behaviour before a visit is often the nervous system bracing; behaviour after is often the nervous system discharging.

This dysregulation is not your child saying they don’t want to see family, and it’s rarely a sign that visits should stop. It’s the predictable signal of a brain handling a big shift in a setting that demands a lot of it. Recognising the pattern usually changes what helps.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Avoid confrontation and accusations — “Are you lying to me?” or “I know that’s not what happened” usually shuts the conversation down without surfacing anything more accurate. Ask simple, concrete questions instead (“Did you start with the math worksheet or the reading?”) and use what you already know to offer a scaffold: “I remember the teacher said you finished the worksheet but had trouble with the reading. Does that sound right?” Triangulating from teachers and other adults, rather than relying on your child as the sole reporter, gives you a more accurate picture.

Often the most useful goal isn’t the exact truth of one event but keeping your child willing to talk to you about hard things — a child who feels safe shares more over time. And if something with safety implications happened, separate the safety conversation from the truth-telling one: address what to do next and how to prevent it, rather than getting stuck on exactly what happened. Where your child interacts with formal systems (court, medical, police, school discipline), make sure those systems know confabulation is part of the picture, as it changes how their account is interpreted.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

In children with FASD, what looks like lying is often something different. It’s usually connected to memory gaps (they genuinely don’t remember the event the way it happened), processing challenges (the question felt complex or confrontational and they gave the brain’s best attempt at an answer), or confabulation — the brain filling in missing information without the child being aware they’re inventing the fill-in. The words come out smoothly and confidently, so it looks identical to ordinary lying, but the underlying mechanism is not deceit.

This is another “can’t vs won’t” situation: if your child can’t reliably retrieve and report events accurately, pressing for “the truth” won’t produce it — it tends to make them more anxious and more likely to confabulate further. Supporting their memory and communication works far better than escalating the demand for accuracy.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

For a child with FASD, chronological age is usually not the right reference point. The supervision your child needs is generally closer to what would suit their developmental age — and so are your expectations for independence, problem-solving, routines, and self-management. Calibrating to where they actually function, not where their birthday says they should be, reduces friction and sets up more successful moments. This isn’t over-parenting; it’s brain-based caregiving that matches support to the actual capacity in the room.

Practically, that means more structure, step-by-step guidance, an adult nearby, a checklist or visual cue, and concrete language (“put the cup in the sink, then come to the table”). If you’re uncertain about calibration — especially around safety in the community, online, or with peers — your social worker, resource social worker, family doctor, or FASD key worker can help, and a formal developmental or FASD assessment can document the uneven profile so the whole team sets expectations the same way.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Children with FASD typically have uneven developmental profiles. Some abilities — often verbal skills, surface social behaviour, or areas of special interest — may be at or near age level, while others, especially executive functioning, emotional regulation, memory, and daily-life skills, lag significantly behind their chronological age. It’s common for a ten-year-old with FASD to function emotionally and behaviourally more like a six- or seven-year-old in certain contexts. They may seem ten in one moment and six in the next, depending on what’s being asked of them.

The unevenness is part of the picture, and both sides are real — the mature reasoning you sometimes see and the gap in other areas need to be held at once. This doesn’t mean treating your child as younger across the board; it means recognising the unevenness and matching your support to the area, not to the calendar.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Consequences rely on the child remembering and applying the lesson next time — and for many children with FASD, that loop isn’t reliably closed by the brain, so stacking heavier consequences usually doesn’t help. The more effective approach is to scaffold the environment so the rule is easier to follow in the moment.

A few things that tend to work: put visual reminders right where the rule applies — a picture cue at the door, near the snacks, by the homework spot — so the prompt is present when the decision is being made. Break big expectations like “get ready for bed” into small, supported steps. Lean on protective (not punitive) supervision — being more present at the moment the rule applies — rather than consequences after the fact. And calibrate expectations to where your child actually functions in memory, impulse control, and judgment, which is often below their chronological age.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes