On 2006-03-08 06:04:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Julie- two things. Wait until your darling Katie goes through puberty!
More importantly, you detailed types of programs (rehab, juvie, mental health facilities etc). You said these would cover everyone with no need for these so-called emotional growth facilities.
We may have finally gotten at the core of our disagreement. Many kids do NOT fit into any of these categories. I know mine did not. He would have been greatly harmed by ANY of the options listed in your post. This is why the emotional growth industry has developed and why quality programs of this type are needed.
Another point- you all continue to ignore the fact that (going back to the original post and the point of the thread) Grant Price and the Merritts did exactly that with Carlbrook- they started a program based on what they thought needed to be different based on their experiences in a program. They did JUST what the OP is advocating, but continue to be slammed as operating some sort of abusive facility. These three guys went through the whole deal- being taken away, wanting to run away from Cascade, challenging the program....
"
See, that's your problem in a nutshell. You have no reason to think my kid will be anything but average-okay as a teenager.
You just have to think that's going to happen to other people, because you're wedded to the notion that it "just happened" to you and your kid and wasn't the result of you being a fucked up parent.
I will say even good parents can have a wild child, but when I do, I'm just saying that. I don't really mean it. Or, more to the point, I only mean it for a very small, specific subset.
Every wild child I ever knew had parents who were ultra-permissive, were ultra-controlling, or were just plain actively-unstable insane.
The only time you get good parents who have a wild child is when the kid was adopted or fostered and already had serious problems when he arrived in their care *or* when the kid came down with a mental illness and the parents had no clue what they were dealing with or what to do about it.
We're stable. We have moderate and sensible rules. We enforce them consistently. Our daughter already (unfortunately) has a mental illness and we're on top of it.
You say "your darling Katie" as if we think she could do no wrong. Nope, that's not us, and all our friends and neighbors in the community know that's not us.
Everybody in the neighborhood knows that we're the kind of people that if they have a problem with us, or our kid, or our dog barking, or a loud party, or whatever, that they can come right to the door and talk to us and we'll work with them to be good neighbors. Everybody in the neighborhood knows that if we have a problem with them, they're not going to hear about it in gossip that gets back to them, or have the cops called on their kid or their loud party or their loose dog. They know we'll go talk to them about it and work it out.
Our daughter's school knows that if they have a problem, they can call us, or email us, or send a note home and we'll get with them and work it out.
We're not perfect. Our kid's not perfect. Like most of our neighbors and our friends down at the dojo, we're just average, good folks.
The parents of the real wild children in high school were not average, good folks. Those parents were *noticeably* screwed up to the eyes of their kids, the other kids, and the other parents in the community.
Not everybody saw it, but in every case you had other kids and other parents quietly commenting how screwy those parents were. Before the kid went wild.
I grew up in a small town city. People knew other people's business. The parents whose kids went wild as teens---you could see it coming a mile off, years before it happened.
Since you say your kid didn't need to be in a mental hospital, then you're not a parent it "just happened" to. Your neighbors and your kid's peers saw it coming a mile off. They wouldn't have said it to you because they wouldn't have wanted to make your problems their problems.
If your kid is your bio child, then you were either ultra-permissive, a control freak, or were totally wack.
Our Katie isn't perfect and won't be perfect. We love her, but she isn't a little angel who can do no wrong. She's just an average, pretty-good kid.
If I want you to think that our Katie is going to have problems, it's only because you desperately need to think that your kid's problems were something that just happened to you instead of happening because you were fucked up and you screwed up.
Every average, decent parent of a teenager has their kid make a certain number of the usual teenage mistakes. Difference is, how much trouble, how bad, and whether the parents react proportionally and sanely to the problems.
If your kid didn't fit one of those categories, he didn't need to be institutionalized. So either you're a control freak, a formerly ultra-permisssive who panicked, or just plain wack.
What your kid needed, if he didn't fit one of those categories, was to be out of your house and under the roof of moderate, average, responsible, sane foster parents in their own home.
I've seen a lot of wild kids, and I'm just going based on what I knew about the parents of all the dangerously wild kids I ever knew.
For ninety percent plus of them, putting them under the roof and in the care of sane, responsible, foster parents--with a good social worker to help the transition as they settled in with each other--would have cured ninety percent of what ailed them.
Julie
