Child Application
Hi! My name is Charles Andrew Wilson and I am a 5th grader. I am 11 years old. Please use he/him pronouns when referring to me!
Basic InformationFull Name: Charles Andrew Wilson
Nickname, if Any: Charlie
Age: 11
Birthday: March 9th
Sex: Male
Pronouns: He/Him
Current Grade in School: 5th
Special Needs: Charlie has some
deep emotional scarring from his mother's abuse
PersonalityWhat are your greatest strengths? inquisitive; curious; adventurous; independent; hard-working; willing to help; kind to animals
What are your greatest weaknesses? disobedient; defiant; independent; tends to walk into trouble; annoying; sensitive; juvenile
What do you struggle with? Charlie's
biggest struggle is dealing with people being angry or upset with him. If he perceives that someone is upset with him, he is likely to simply shut down rather than asking questions. Rejection and abandonment are huge for him.
What are your hobbies or interests? playing baseball; video games; reading; model airplanes; rc vehicles (airplanes and cars); skateboarding
What do you really enjoy? watching YouTube videos of skateboarders; playing baseball; big family dinners; celebrations; desserts; Christmas; summer vacation; movie nights; having people come to his games; following after the older kids; swimming
What do you really dislike? spending too much time alone; being made to eat foods he doesn't like; being stuck indoors for too long; green vegetables; wearing shoes all the time; being left out; learning history in school; going to school; teachers who don't like him
What are your favorite things? his baseball glove; an old birthday card he can't part with; his pillow
What do you fear? abandonment; rejection; people being angry with him; getting lost
Describe your personality in 100-500 words: Charlie is a very active young boy. If his mind or body isn't active, he tends to get into a
lot of trouble, especially since his mouth can run away with him. He's smart, but he's not the quickest learner, which means that he's prone to repeating the same mistakes over and over again, often expecting a different result. Since most of his poor behavior isn't about doing things for which he might or might not be
caught (in that he often misbehaves directly to an adult through disobedience or defiance). At his heart, he's a good kid with a big heart, but his fear of rejection or people getting angry with him tends to color the way he behaves, giving them reasons to prove him right, which only hurts his sensitive heart even more. This can make him difficult. He's a boy, and like a lot of boys he was taught to "man up," so he does his best to hide his feelings, all while they fester and often produce poor behavior as a result.
Relationships & BehaviorHow do you normally get along with adults? Because he is desperate to be loved, Charlie acts out a lot to force adults to prove their love to him. Most adults outside of the Village don't particularly like Charlie as a result. He's defiant, he's loud, he's often disrespectful, and he's disruptive in his classes at school. All of these factors contribute to him being a child who does not generally get along well with adults. It doesn't help that he's conscious of the fact they don't like him, and the more they dislike him, the more he acts out. It's a cycle that he doesn't know how to stop on his own and up to this point, no adult has been able to help him stop it, either.
How do you normally get along with teenagers? Charlie's one of those younger kids who follows teenagers around wherever they go, getting in their hair and under their skin -- and often getting
them in trouble, to boot. Teenagers generally prefer to avoid him, either because they find him annoying or because they often get into trouble because he's "made them snap at him." Meanwhile, he doesn't get in trouble for doing the thing that drove them to snap in the first place, leading most teens to prefer
not to hang around with Charlie. He either doesn't know that he's bugging them or he doesn't care. It's hard to tell which it truly is.
How do you normally get along with other children? On the one hand, Charlie gets along pretty well with other kids his own age and younger, and that's fine. On the other hand, he prefers to hang around with the "big kids" (teenagers, mostly), and so he doesn't spend a lot of time around kids his own age. This doesn't leave tons of room for him to make friends with people, so while he
gets along with them, he doesn't necessarily
become friends with them the way that a lot of kids befriend one another around this age. It would be very good for him to develop these kinds of friendships, of course, but he's going to take some work before he can. (We'll also know more once there are more kids in this age range on the site!)
How independent are you? Very
How do you normally react when you get into trouble? Charlie's first reaction to getting into trouble is to shut down emotionally. He will do everything in his power not to engage with the adult who is punishing him or about to punish him because he doesn't want to feel their anger and rejection. Fortunately, most adults at the Orphan Village know about this tactic and will push past it. Charlie
needs that because otherwise he will be left to stew in a host of bad feelings, and that would not be healthy for him in the long term.
Link to your discipline sheet: click here ✅
Orphan Village How long have you lived at the Orphan Village? Just Arrived
Which House do you belong to? Maple
What is your grade in school? 5th
How did you come to live in the Orphan Village? Charlie's mom was a single mother with a lot of problems. He's been in and out of foster care, often because she sent him to live with strangers, rather than him being removed by social services, and the last time she met a man she was more interested in than him, she sent him to Birchwood Isle -- which is, shall we say,
permanent.
Who are your favorite people in the Orphan Village? The teenagers, mostly the "middle adolescents" around 15 or 16 years old. He's been following the girls around mostly so far, but that may be because there are initially more of them than there are boys. He has not, so far, bonded with any of the adults because he fears abandonment and therefore fears getting attached to them.
What are your favorite places in the Orphan Village? Easily the adventure camp. When he's not playing sports or building model airplanes, Charlie is outdoors and exploring, especially in places he's technically not supposed to be.
What are your favorite things to do in the Orphan Village? Explore. Charlie can disappear for hours and usually turns back up just in time to avoid anybody noticing he was out of bounds.
How do you get along with caregivers and authority figures in the Orphan Village? Charlie's been through the ringer when it comes to caregivers, and most of all he's quick to say that he has been
lied to by most adults -- one of the reasons he's so quick to lie
to adults. So while he struggles with typical adults (say, school teachers),
caregivers are an entirely different classification that receives the widest and most significant distrust from Charlie. Caregivers lie. Period. He knows that. So he "knows" that when they tell him they care about him, love him, that he's a good kid beneath all of his toughness, he "knows" they are lying. This makes his relationships with caregivers in the Orphan Village especially challenging, at least in the beginning. His trust will need to be earned the hard way. The very hard way.
How do you get along with other children in the Orphan Village? Well, Charlie tends to be something of a ringleader with other kids his own age. He doesn't mean to be, but he's kind of fallen into a role where he proposes schemes that other kids wind up getting involved in, and the next thing anybody knows, there's a semi-large group of kids off doing something they aren't supposed to do and a wild search for kids who aren't where they are supposed to be. As previously stated, Charlie generally prefers to hang out with the older kids (teenagers), but that is obviously not always possible and in spite of his preference, he does spend more time either on his own or with kids his own age than he does trailing after teens.
How do you get along with teenage adolescents in the Orphan Village? That depends largely on who you ask. Charlie thinks he gets along great with the older kids because he considers himself one of them. On the other hand, the teenagers he's constantly trailing after find him pretty annoying, for the most part, and most of them aren't afraid to say that they find him ridiculous and annoying. He doesn't think much of it, and he quickly laughs it off, which is not something that the
teenagers enjoy, but at least it doesn't seem to impact his self-esteem too much. For whatever reason, he can take their rejection, but not rejection from adults.
How do you get along with young adult adolescents in the Orphan Village? As far as Charlie's concerned, they're adults. He views them the same way and gets along with them the same way. Learning that they are classified like teenagers will be eye-opening for him.
Do you hope to be adopted someday? Yes
Describe your ideal adoptive family. It's actually hard to say. The most important thing for Charlie is that he attaches to his adoptive parents -- preferably both of them if there are two, but definitely at least one of them -- before the adoption process can even begin. From there, it is essential that they remain truly consistent with him as time goes on. He'd do
best as the youngest in the family, but that is legitimately not set in stone.
Is there anything else we should know about your life at the Orphan Village? Charlie really struggles with following rules. He's never met a rule he didn't want to break just so he can find out what will happen if he does. It will help him a lot to have the structure of a system in place that forces him back into line when he steps out of it, but I imagine that he's going to wind up getting into a
lot of trouble in the very beginning.
BackgroundDescribe your history in 150-1000 words: Charlie's mother never wanted children. The story goes that she was actively preventing pregnancy at the time she became pregnant with him, and that she attempted to have an abortion but it "didn't work," according to her. She was forced to become a parent when she didn't even want to become pregnant, and Charlie spent most of his life before Birchwood Isle hearing about how she didn't want him, he was a nuisance, and she was in the way of the things that she wanted to do with her life. She had been "saddled with him" according to his grandparents. There was never a father in the picture at all.
He internalized all of this, and being unwanted became Charlie's identity.
Charlie was five the first time his mother put him in foster care. He spent two weeks sleeping on the floor of the social services building where he lived in Wisconsin before a family could be found for him. Then he had four months living with a decent foster family before his mother applied to have him back. Nobody told him why she wanted him back, but Charlie was... Well, relieved at first. No child wants to be placed in foster care, even when the caregivers are decent and the parent is not. So he returned to the familiar home, the familiar emotional and verbal abuse, the familiar neglect, and he stayed there until he was seven years old, when his mother met a new man who had no intention of allowing a little boy to ruin their relationship. Back to foster care he went, this time to a family that was rougher around the edges, rougher on him, and reinforced what his mother had told him. He stayed with them for a few months before being bounced to another family, and then... home again.
All in all, Charlie went into foster care and back to his mother five times between the ages of five and eleven, when she finally took him to Birchwood Isle and simply dropped him off there, alone, for a customs agent to take him to the police station, then to the department of social services, and finally to the Orphan Village. He'll never admit to it, but Charlie is deeply confused by the culture of the island and doesn't understand what it means that he can't simply go back to his mother this time around. Everybody says they are protecting him, but he's lived with worthlessness as his identity for so long that he doesn't understand why he can't go back home.
OtherIs there anything else we need to know about you? not at this time
