On 2006-06-30 16:15:00, Anonymous wrote:
"I am grown up and so much older than you! You have no idea where I am coming from and what I have gone through, what my son has gone through, and what my son and I have gone through with his Father and his fucking Russian step Mom. I do understand where you are coming from, I do, but since you are only 21 years old, there is no way you can understand where I am coming from and what my son is feeling right now. He is doing well right now and that is what I want for him, the very best, and when you have kids someday, then you will understand, perhaps you won't have to go through the mess that my son and I had to go through, perhaps you will have a perfect marriage and a wonderful son or daughter and I hope that you do. Just understand that nothing in life is perfect and you have to work at all of it all the time.
"
Get over it, sister.
I'm 39, I
do have a kid, and of course I'm not perfect, she's not perfect, my husband is not perfect, and our lives aren't perfect.
Everybody and everything in the world is not perfect. Got it. BTDT.
You sound from this post like your kid is currently in a behavior mod facility, so everything else I'm going to say is based on that assumption:
Unless your child is severely retarded or otherwise severely mentally damaged to the point of needing to be institutionalized, or is mentally ill enough to need to be committed even if he was an adult, or is in a responsible (100 days or less) drug rehab program, or was court ordered after a criminal conviction, you have no damned business sticking your kid in a facility.
Even then, behavior modification facilities are for no one. They're a bad solution looking for a problem.
For every other problem, community based outpatient care has the best outcomes.
For drug rehab, community based care also has the best outcome percentages, but inpatient rehab works for some people---if it's more than 100 days, though, you're being sold a pile of crap.
If you put your kid in a behavior mod facility, then you screwed up by the numbers no matter who you are.
That's the cold, hard truth.
It's not a personal attack, it's just the truth of the best available research with the best percentages for the best results.
Contending otherwise is as out of sync with reality as joining the flat earth society.
Contending otherwise is
understandable, since the behavioral mod. facilities talk a good game and, like faith healers, they can do a bang up job of making you think they've helped you.
Understandable, but factually incorrect.
I get that it sucks bigtime to screw up by the numbers in such a major part of care for your child.
Regardless of how much it would suck to admit that, you screwed up.
It doesn't make you a bad person, but you did make a bad choice.
Regardless of what you may believe, a behavior mod facility has not helped your son. They may have presented a convincing illusion, to you, of having helped your son. Your son may appear more compliant, or may be better at hiding his problems from you. Your son may have matured some while he was there as part of the natural teenage growth process---maturation that would have happpened no matter where your kid was, and would have happened to a greater extent.
Most program parents at this point would say, "You don't know that." Yes, I do. I've looked at the available research for the various kinds of problems these facilities claim to serve. I am trained enough to interpret that research and know what's sound research and what the various reports mean. If your child did in fact improve more than some other kid(s) somewhere, it was pure chance--not the Program. More likely, he improved *less* than he would have elsewhere and, like many other program parents, you are now seeing a fleeting illusion of improvement that conceals the same problems plus permanent psychological damage caused by the program.
Yes, I do know that. The numbers don't lie.
Again, even though kids come out of programs along a broad spectrum of outcomes, where the kid is on that spectrum is a statistical roll of the dice, not a benefit of the Program.
It's just like when the FDA studies give some patients a placebo, after the study period of time, the patients come out along a broad spectrum of outcomes---even though the placebo hasn't done a damn thing for them.
The only way you know if a new drug works better than a placebo, or better than an existing drug on the market, is to look at the overall statistics.
By the overall statistics, behavior mod facilities work equal to or worse than nothing at all. They do no good, and frequently do harm.
Community based care, on the other hand, works. You have kids coming out of that care along a broad range of outcomes, like anything else. However, we know it works because the overall statistics of those outcomes show real improvement.
You screwed up.
Be a good enough parent to admit your mistake, to stop doing something that doesn't work, to determine if your son has grown up enough on his own or still needs some help. If so, be responsible enough to switch to a kind of care that actually works.
Right now, you're being the equivalent of the Christian Science parent who's got the preacher praying over their kid in the hospital from a car wreck instead of letting a doctor give the kid a transfusion.
The preacher may look to you like he's helping your kid. Your kid may feel good about being prayed over, or you may feel comforted by the prayers. Your kid may even pull through and get well--by blind chance and the body's healing processes. But his chances sure would be better if you would eject the preacher from the kid's room and let the doc give junior a transfusion.
Julie
