On 2006-03-09 20:58:00, TheWho wrote:
" So, if your kid is all that bad, then you've made that butt and you're stuck with living with that butt. If you work hard with him *in the right way* you might be able to make him be not such a big butt.
Julie -- Why cant you have a little understanding and compassion for families who are having problems? It doesn?t have to be the kids fault or the parents fault. It could be the dynamics that are not working or causing the problem. Maybe your butt is fat because of a thyroid condition and you could eat well balanced meals, keep your intake under 1,000 calories/day and work out 3 times a week and still have to deal with a fat butt everyday unless you seek outside help.
"
I have compassion fatigue for Program Parents because they have so little *real* compassion for the kids, and because my experience of the Program Parents is that they don't take responsibility for their contributions to the problem.
I have all the compassion in the world for someone who says, "Yeah, this is where I screwed up, a lot of this pickle I'm in came from stuff I did or neglected to do." I have that compassion provided the someone then takes responsibility for fixing it by doing the hard work themselves, not just throwing money to have someone else go through the pain and suffering instead of them.
Program Parents complaining about the "pain" of having their kids in a program is like someone on trial for killing his parents asking for leniency from the court because he's an orphan.
Most people with fat butts don't have thyroid conditions, they do not work out 3 times a week, they do not keep their calories down to the amount that would ordinarily (for any person generally) feed their target weight.
Most people who think their kids are big butts had a whole lot to do with them growing that way.
Why can't you tell the difference between compassion and enabling?
Too many people say, "Oh, it's okay, I'm sure it's not your fault. Okay, well, maybe only a little, but you're such a good parent, you're working so *haaard* now." They say it because they know it's what you want to hear, and maybe because they want to hear it back.
Having screwed up royally does not make a parent an axe murderer. However, it is counter-productive to give such parents too much sympathy when they're using that sympathy as an excuse to offload the pain and suffering from their behavior onto someone else instead of taking responsibility and *genuinely* working their way out of the hole they dug for themselves.
Offloading the pain and suffering onto the kid before fixing your own problems and letting the kid experiencing you parenting *right* is abdicating responsibility.
So many Program Parents complain their kids don't take responsibility for their behavior, and the harm it causes, or understand that their are consequences for their bad behavior.
Well where the hell do they think the kids learned *that* from?
It's not that I don't have sympathy for these kids, and for the parents who are obviously lost in the woods.
I just think it does the kids a disservice to be one more person patting the parents on the back for trying to substitute money for personal responsibility.
I have all the sympathy and compassion in the world for the parents who bring their kids home and then begin the hard work of taking personal responsibility for developing and applying healthy parenting skills.
The parents who take responsibility, bring their kids home, and start the long process of *personally* working on their parenting behaviors have the very same screwups in their past as the Program Parents.
The difference is that the parents who are learning and applying good parenting *at home*, with a good family therapist helping the parents learn those skills if those parents need outside help, are taking responsibility and accepting their own consequences of their own behavior themselves, while the Program Parents are still evading responsibility and trying to offload the personal life consequences of the parents' mistakes onto their child.
Program Parents have a very poor sense of boundaries telling the difference between what screwups and problems are their own screwups and problems and their own responsibility to fix, versus what screwups and problems are their kids' screwups and problems and their kids' responsibility to fix.
Using the Program offloads huge amounts of the parents' own responsibilities, screwups, and natural consequences onto their child.
I'm not saying the kid doesn't have responsibilities, screwups, and natural consequences.
I'm saying the portion of the problem that's the kid's responsibility, etc., versus the portion of the problem that's the parents' responsibility, etc., is *vastly* overestimated by Program Parents.
If by "compassion" you mean not telling Program Parents that they've screwed up, are still screwing up, and are evading responsibility for their own behavior by offloading it onto their kid, then the name for that is enabling.
I try not to do that.
I don't think a Program Parent is a shitty excuse for a human being or anything even remotely approaching one. You are not slime, you are not scum, you are not lower than low.
However, Program Parents have made a lot more lousy choices than they admit to, have a lot more responsibility for the ongoing situation than they admit to, and the act of sending the child to the Program offloads huge amounts of the Program Parents' responsibilities onto the child, heaped on top of the child's real responsibilities, in exchange for a whole lot of money.
You're not slime for having behaved badly, you just need to take responsibility and stop the bad behavior, and stop making excuses for having evaded that responsibility---which was another big mistake.
I have all the compassion in the world for parents of very difficult kids when the parents take responsibility and start behaving better.
I'm not doing the Program thing of calling you horrible names for your every mistake, you just need to do a better job of separating your mistakes out from your kid's mistakes and start behaving better.
Nobody expects Program Parents to learn better parenting skills overnight, but we do want them to admit leaving their kid there would be another huge mistake and make that first positive act of bringing their kid home.
If their kid is already out, then the first, big, positive act needs to be admitting to the kid that using a Program was a huge mistake and sincerely apologizing to him/her for it.
You're not a horrible person, you're just not stepping up and being responsible yet, and it would be much better if you did.
Julie
