Orphan Souls

Her prime example of holding therapy's benefits is the two-year-old she held for six hours a day for several months. "Everyone in the family had teeth marks until we got her tamed down," Miller says. "She didn't like the holding, she didn't want to get close to me, but I was pretty persistent -- and I was a lot bigger than her. Sometimes she would scream for an hour or two or three. And I would hold her until she calmed down."

Last year the children told a CPS caseworker that Miller and her husband were neglecting them, getting drunk, having orgies and molesting the children. "These children are not at all committed to the truth," Miller says.

CPS took custody of all eight children. The youngest two girls were gone nine days, three of the boys were away from home for two months, and a boy and a girl were out of the house for three and a half months. The last child just returned a few weeks ago after a year-and-a-half-long absence. "He's gonna be a fine young man," Miller says. "They're all lovely children now."

Three-year-old Ja-Juan Schreck hit, pinched, punched, bit and kicked other children until they cried. He didn't have the strength to hurt them, but he wanted to. He ignored his parents and refused to use the bathroom. Ja-Juan wouldn't let anyone touch him and never smiled. When he enrolled in the Head Start program in Eagle Lake last year, an aide was hired to follow him around all day to keep him from hurting other kids. He couldn't go two minutes without throwing a temper tantrum.

His mother was a crack addict, so the first four months of his life, Ja-Juan went through withdrawal. He screamed and wouldn't let his adoptive mother, Katherine Milton, touch him. Wriggling on Milton's lap, Ja-Juan wears a blue Power Rangers T-shirt and snaps his fingers, talking about how much he loves scary Stephen King movies, blood, guts and gore. Since April, attachment therapist Beth Powell has been working on improving Ja-Juan's cause-and-effect thinking, and focusing on school- appropriate behavior and talking in an indoor voice.

He turns to a stranger in the room and says he wants to punch her nose and make it bleed. "Previously he would have acted it out," Powell says. "Now he's just talking about it."

"When I get older, I can have a gun," he says.

"What are you going to do with a gun?" Powell asks.

"Shoot a bird."

"What are you going to do with the bird?"

"Cook it," he says.

Every evening Cheryl Hayword and her husband pray for God to heal their foster son's heart. "The devil's my only hope," the nine-year-old says and walks out of the room.

James (not his real name) has lived with the Haywords for three months. In that time he has "inappropriately touched" his foster father, his foster sister and the family dog. James pulled down his swim trunks at the subdivision's pool, and tried to kiss, bite and grope his foster sister's friend.

He screams and throws tantrums in restaurants, gets into fights on the school bus and steals toy cars from garage sales. "It's like having a two-year-old you can't put in the playpen," Hayword says.

When he was two years old, James was removed from his alcoholic, drug-using parents' home and sent to live with his aunt and uncle for two years, then bounced around to foster families.

He's afraid of the dark and won't go outdoors after dusk. He refused to laugh or cry around his foster parents. When the family vacationed in Louisiana, he was afraid the house would be gone when they returned.

Attachment therapist Nancy Hernandez says that when James misbehaves, Hayword should "stop, drop and cuddle."

But Children's Protective Services requires foster parents to take a four-hour training session before they're allowed to restrain a child who is throwing a tantrum. "You wouldn't ever pin them down," says CPS spokesperson Judy Hay. A caseworker has to grant special permission for parents to learn how to do a basket hold, to wrap their arms and legs around the child to keep him from hurting himself.

Although foster parents are encouraged to hug and cuddle kids, they aren't allowed to do holding therapy, Hay says. "Foster parents are not licensed therapists."

James refused to drink from a bottle as Hernandez suggested, and when Hayword first tried to hold James, he would bite, pinch, spit and dig his fingernails into her skin. "We held him anyway," Hayword says. "But he's getting bigger."

On a Tuesday afternoon he sits on his mother's lap pointing out fresh mosquito bites dotting his legs. He lays his head down and snuggles. "See, Miss Nancy? This is the real boy," Hayword says.

Hayword rocks back and forth. Hernandez packs up her bag, waves good-bye and walks out the front door. "That's the therapy," Hernandez says.